Community Oceanography with low-cost, open-source CTDs

On September 14, 2022, I gave a talk on community oceanography and the OpenCTD for the AtlantOS Ocean Hour “Democratizing ocean observations through low-cost technologies” workshop. Below is the transcript from that talk.

Good morning and thank you for inviting me.

Access to the tools of science is not equitable, and nowhere is this inequality of access more pronounced than in the ocean sciences, where all but a few entities have the capital to mount major oceanographic research campaigns. I come from the world of deep-sea ecology, where budgets can quickly climb into the tens of millions of dollars. But even small-scale coastal research can be stymied by the need for vessels, equipment, and instruments, access to which is often controlled by research institutions.

As the need to understand the dramatic changes happening both at the surface and beneath the waves accelerates, barriers to access that precludes the participation of the full breadth of ocean stakeholders erodes our potential to understand, anticipate, and mitigate those changes.

One of the missions of my post-Academic career has been to make the tools of ocean science more accessible to more people. I believe that the ocean belongs to everyone and that the tools to study the ocean should be available to anyone with the curiosity and motivation to pursue that inquiry.

Chief among those tools is the workhorse of oceanography, the CTD.

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3 kid-friendly STEAM electronics projects that harness NOAA’s massive public databases

This is the winter of finding as many good, educational projects to keep our kids as occupied as possible. If you’re anything like me, you probably have a stack of assorted electronics in various stages of disrepair, which is great for your hardware hacking dads and moms, but kids need projects with a little more structure and, especially for the younger ones, a lot less soldering.

We can’t build open-source CTDs every day.

Fortunately, the awesome folks at Adafruit have built up an absolutely massive collection of electronics projects using just about every component you can imagine. I’ve culled through the archive to find three kid-friendly (projects that don’t require soldering or involve particularly risky components) ocean and weather projects that take advantage of NOAA’s publicly available databases to help students learn a little bit about electronics and the natural world.

All of these projects were built with the help of my kiddo (age four), require no soldering or electronics skills to start, involve just enough coding to stay interesting, and use Adafruit’s CircuitPython ecosystem, which is fairly easy to learn. Adafruit does a great job compiling detailed instruction for every project. These can all be completed in a lazy afternoon.

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Tear gassing fish, new NOAA chief, and Facebook’s flop – What’s Up With the Oceans this Week?

Tear gas is bad for fish. Surprising no one, if you unlawfully unload tons of tear gas into a peaceful crowd of protestors in order to create chaos as a precedent for state violence, that tear gas will eventually find its way into drains and all drains lead to the ocean. And that is bad news for marine life.

More turnover at NOAA. NOAA has appointed meteorologist and climate change contrarian Ryan Maue to replace Dr. Craig McLean as Chief Scientist.

Facebook continues to Facebook. Facebook vowed to fight climate change denial and uplift climate science. Instead, they censored hundreds of climate activism who were protesting the Coastal Link pipeline.

Hagfish nom-nommers, Trample-gramming, boring clams, I’m still in love with these giant isopods, and more! Monday Morning Salvage: April 8, 2019.

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

A wood-boring clam inside a piece of wood
Photo: Jenna Judge
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Commerce Unveils a Budget to Decimate NOAA

Late yesterday afternoon, the Department of Commerce unveiled its long awaited budget proposal. Designed in large part to free up funding for President Trump’s ill-conceived, wasteful, and wildly unpopular wall on the Southern Border, it includes cuts to NOAA programs so deep that America’s coastal communities and coastal economies will take generations to recover.

Read it here:

The Department of Commerce Budget in Brief: Fiscal Year 2020

When Secretary Wilbur Ross took office, he pledge to support science-based decision making built on the foundation of unbiased data collection, stating:

“If confirmed, I intend to see that the Department provides the public with as much factual and accurate data as we have available. It is public tax dollars that support the Department’s scientific research, and barring some national security concern, I see no valid reason to keep peer reviewed research from the public.”

“To be clear, by peer review I mean scientific review and not a political filter. In closing, if confirmed, I want to ensure the Department continues to attract Nobel-prize winning scientists and remains a global leader in all of the research it conducts. The Department’s responsibilities are many and the public deserves to see them executed at a world class level.”

Trump nominee pledges to shield NOAA climate scientists from intimidation, censorship.

He even earned accolades from ocean scientists for his early actions and appointments.

Whatever goodwill Secretary Ross may have earned has been destroyed by this new budget, which is nothing less than an attack on American Science, America’s Coastal Communities, and America’s Ocean Economy. It is a betrayal of whatever values Ross claimed to posses during his nomination. This budget is the product of mediocre men of limited vision. I can’t even be mad, I’m just disappointed.

Below are just a few of the most uninspired cuts to the NOAA budget.

Coastal Economies

Zero funding for the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund.

The Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund finances state, tribal and local conservation initiatives to help recover threatened and endangered Pacific salmon populations. The FY 2020 Budget includes $0 funding for this program. The agency will continue its Federal commitment to advancing Pacific salmon and steelhead recovery and Tribal treaty fishing rights through other NOAA programs as resources allow.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 62)
  • Reduce funding for repair/replacement of Coastal Observing Assets.
  • Reduce funding for the Coastal Mapping Program.
  • Eliminate regional Geospatial Modeling Grants.
  • Reduce Integrated Ocean Observing System Regional Observation Grants.
  • Terminate National Centers for Coastal Ocean Service.
  • Eliminate Single-Year Grants to Joint Ocean and Coastal Mapping Center.

Reduces the additional resources provided in the Consolidated Appropriations Act, FY 2019 to increase research and monitoring of North Atlantic right whales to better understand how the species interacts with fisheries and shipping traffic and is adapting to changing ocean conditions and shifting feeding grounds.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 73)
  • Eliminate NCCOS competitive funding support for research on ecological threats.
  • Eliminate funding support for Integrated Water Prediction.
  • Eliminate Coastal Zone Management Grants.
  • Eliminate Federal Funding Support for the Title IX Fund .
  • Reduce funding for Innovative Coral Reef Restoration Initiatives.
  • Eliminate Federal Funding Support for National Estuarine Research Reserve System.

John H. Prescott Marine Mammal Rescue Assistance Grant Program provides grants or cooperative agreements to eligible marine mammal stranding network participants. Commerce’s budget eliminate this program.

  • Reduces funding previously provided by Congress for New England groundfish research.
  • Reduces Congressionally-directed funding for development and implementation of agency-independent and alternative approaches to research and stock assessments for reef fish in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic
  • Reduces additional funding for the Seafood Import Monitoring Program.
  • Reduces support for implementation of new catch share programs.
  • Reduces funding for Mitchell Act hatcheries and implementation of the Pacific Salmon Treaty.
  • Reduces funding for the three Interstate Fishery Management Commissions.
  • Eliminates financial assistance program to promote state activities in the management of interjurisdictional fisheries resources.

Eliminates funding to support the Cooperative Enforcement Program (CEP). NOAA will not be able to implement Joint Enforcement Agreements (JEA) with 27 state and U.S. territory partners. These JEAs provide funds to state and U.S. territorial law enforcement agencies to perform enforcement services in support of Federal regulations.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 75)
  • Eliminates grants for on-the-ground habitat restoration projects.
  • Decrease the funding used to advance priority activities in its Ocean, Coastal, and Great Lakes Labs.
  • Terminate Mississippi State Partnership.

Exploration

[Commerce] requests a decrease to eliminate Federal funding for Marine Sanctuaries Telepresence Grants. These Congressionally directed grants provide funding to explore and document the deep-sea oceanography, marine habitats, cultural sites, and living and non-living resources in and around national marine sanctuaries to better understand their biology, ecology, geology, and cultural resources.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 73)
  • Eliminate Research Grants for Monuments.
  • Eliminate the autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) demonstration testbed.
  • Eliminate the environmental genomics program.
  • NOAA will terminate the Oceanographic Research Partnership Program.
  • End competitive acquisition of data from [uncrewed] surface vehicles (USVs).

[Commerce] will decrease its extramural ocean exploration and research efforts by reducing funding to the Cooperative Institute for Ocean Exploration, Research and Technology, the Global Foundation for Ocean Exploration, and the interagency Biodiversity Observation Network.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 77)

Climate Change

  • Eliminate funding for NOAA’s Antarctic Ecosystem Research Program.
  • NOAA will decrease the funding within the OAR Climate Laboratories.

NOAA will eliminate Arctic research within the Climate Laboratories & Cooperative Institutes PPA. NOAA will terminate some Arctic research products and improvements to operational sea ice modeling and predictions.

NOAA will eliminate Arctic research within the Regional Climate Data & Information PPA. NOAA will terminate some Arctic research products and improvements to operational sea ice modeling and predictions.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 76)
  • Eliminate Climate Competitive Research Funding.
  • Eliminate Climate Competitive Research PPA.
  • Reduce funding for the Integrated Ocean Acidification Program.
  • Reduce external grant funding that is used to leverage partnerships to develop a sustained, comprehensive, and responsive global ocean observing system.
  • Terminate support for the NOAA Water Level Observation Network.
  • Reduce the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) Platform 55-buoy array by 15 moorings.
  • Reduce the geographic scope and purchase of observations performed by aircraft and will eliminate the aircraft observations over other parts of the oceans and in other continents.

Disaster Prediction and Relief

Zero funding for Fisheries Disaster Assistance

Fisheries Disaster Assistance helps address the environmental and economic effects of a commercial fishery failure. If the Secretary determines that a fishery disaster has occurred, Congress may appropriate funds for disaster assistance, which are administered by the Secretary. The FY 2020 Budget includes $0 funding for this account.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 62)
  • [Commerce] will terminate Vortex-Southeast (VORTEX-SE), a project that seeks to improve tornado forecasts in the southeastern U.S.
  • Terminate research and development on improving the detection and understanding of severe weather with a new airborne phased array radar (APAR) and other airborne measurements
  • Eliminate the Tsunami Research and Operational Warning program.
  • Slow development of the Next Generation Global Prediction System and Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project by reducing research grants for the collaborative research activities and NOAA’s testbeds.

NOAA will decrease the funding used to advance priority activities in its Weather Labs and CIs funding line, including High Performance Computing recapitalization of the Boulder jet supercomputer, Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs), data assimilation initiatives, and other activities that support implementation of the Weather Act.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 76)
  • Terminate efforts associated with the Consumer Option for an Alternative System To Allocate Losses (COASTAL) Act of 2012 implementation within NWS, including efforts to develop the capability to produce detailed “poststorm assessments” in the aftermath of a damaging tropical cyclone that strikes the U.S. or its territories.

Terminate the Regional Climate Centers (RCCs) that provides climate services tailored to the specific needs of the region within which it is located. RCCs respond to emerging issues, such as droughts and floods and each RCC is located at six universities and research institutions that are responsible for managing the RCC resources from NOAA and non-NOAA sources alike.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 80)

Education

NOAA will terminate the National Sea Grant College Program Base and Marine Aquaculture Program. This will eliminate NOAA funding for the network of 33 Sea Grant programs located in coastal States and territories, and withdraw support for the larger cross-NOAA Aquaculture Program.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 77)
  • Terminate the Bay-Watershed Education and Training (B-WET) Regional Program.

Eliminate funding for the Competitive Education Grants Program ($3,000), and the Educational Partnership Program for Minority Serving Institutions (EPP/MSI) ($16,000) within the Office of Education and reduce fund for the Office of Education ($1,006). Remaining funds for the Office of Education of $1,039 will support a centralized office focused on
coordinating and improving the performance of NOAA’s numerous activities in STEM education.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 80)

Gutting NOAA Facilities

Reduces funding for science facilities to support NOAA’s goal of a more efficient Federal footprint. Operating costs will be reduced by divesting three owned properties combined with savings from avoidance of deferred maintenance associated with one of the facilities in the Fisheries and Ecosystem Science Programs and Services budget line. These represent initial actions to reduce NOAA’s footprint.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 63)
  • [Commerce] will close the Air Resources Laboratory and eliminate ARL’s research on air chemistry, mercury deposition, and atmospheric dispersion of harmful materials in order to fund other priority programs.
  • [Commerce] will close its program office and intramural grants dedicated to the research, development, and transition to application of new UAS observing strategies.

Privatizing Satellite Monitoring

The budget request of $10 million for the Office of Space Commerce proposes to reallocate resources of $3.6 million and 11 positions from NOAA Operations, Research and Facilities and $6.4 million in new appropriations. The office focuses on various sectors of the space commerce industry, including satellite navigation (GPS), commercial remote sensing, space transportation, and entrepreneurial activities. The office participates in government-wide discussions of space policy issues as well as internal efforts to increase the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) use of commercial space solutions.

FY 2020 Budget in Brief (Page 9)

This pulls NOAA out of satellite monitoring and forcing the agency to rely on private enterprise. The march towards privatizing space is well under way.

Call your representatives (especially if you live in NC, LA, or MD) and tell them that you expect them to oppose every aspect of this disastrous budget.

You can find your representatives’ contact information here: https://www.callmycongress.com/

Blending smartphones for science, understanding the environmental hazards of 3D printing, flooding the midwest, and ocean news, too! Monday Morning Salvage: March 25, 2019

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

The oldest mariner’s astrolabe ever found, decorated with the Portuguese coat of arms. COURTESY DAVID MEARNS
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Trump’s 2020 Budget will be a Disaster for America’s Coastal Economies

Yesterday the Trump Administration unveiled its proposed budget for fiscal year 2020. This budget contains steep cuts research, education, and social services in order to fund the construction of the border wall. Chief among the cuts is an unprecedented reduction in funding for NOAA, which functionally disbands several core research programs within Ocean Services. From A Budget for a Better America:

“The Budget also proposes to eliminate funding for several lower priority NOAA grant and education programs, including Sea Grant, Coastal Zone Management Grants, and the Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund.”

A Budget for a Better America, page 21

Rumblings on the hill suggest that Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross plans to unveil his own plan to drastically reduce the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and permanently hamstring NOAA in furtherance of the Administration’s goal to find funding to construct a wall on the US southern border.

These cuts include zeroing out the budget for the following agencies and programs:

  • NOAA SeaGrant
  • NOAA Coastal Zone Management Program
  • National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS)
  • Pacific Salmon Restoration Program
  • Potentially at least one fisheries laboratory

These cuts would be catastrophic America’s Coastal Communities and Economies, especially in places like North Carolina, Maryland, and Louisiana.

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Eat hagfish, work at LUMCON, clone Vaquita, question floating trash collectors, and more! Monday Morning Mega-Salvage: August 13, 2018

Foghorn (A Call to Action!)

Flotsam (what we’re obsessed with right now)

Hagfish (just Hagfish)

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