From the “send money or the instrumentation gets it” department comes news that the TAO array may already be toast due to budget constraints. One wonders if money sucked into climate programs might be a factor.
From Nature News: Nearly half of the moored buoys in the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array have failed in the last two years, crippling an early-warning system for the warming and cooling events in the eastern equatorial Pacific, known respectively as El Niño and La Niña. Scientists are now collecting data from just 40% of the array.
“It’s the most important climate phenomenon on the planet, and we have blinded ourselves to it by not maintaining this array,” says Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Seattle, Washington. McPhaden headed the TAO project before it was transferred out of NOAA’s research arm and into the agency’s National Weather Service in 2005.
The network was developed over the course of a decade following the massive El Niño of 1982‒1983. NOAA maintains some 55 buoys across the eastern and central Pacific that monitor weather conditions as well as water temperatures down to 500 metres. Working in concert, the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) maintains another dozen buoys in the western tropical Pacific. Combined, the monitoring system has become a cornerstone for seasonal weather forecasting given the tropical Pacific’s influence on broader weather patterns.
Fig. 1. TAO Array in the Pacific.
Image: NOAAThe TAO array monitors conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Turquoise dots represent US buoys, while yellow dots show Japanese buoys.
An array adrift
The array’s troubles began in 2012, when budget cuts pushed NOAA to retire a ship dedicated to performing the annual servicing that keeps the TAO buoys in working order. According to McPhaden, NOAA’s annual budget for the project stood at about US$10‒$12 million before 2012 — a figure that included around $6 million to cover the dedicated ship. In fiscal year 2013, the agency spent $2‒$3 million to charter boats for maintenance runs, but McPhaden says that these operations have not been enough to keep the system going. Meanwhile, although JAMSTEC has thus far kept its portion of the array up and running, it too is under budgetary pressure.
Full story:
http://www.nature.com/news/el-ni%C3%B1o-monitoring-system-in-failure-mode-1.14582
So where have all those GREEN tax dollars gone?
Straight into the pockets of Obama’s good buddies scamming the tax payers with GREEN corporations that fail (leaving behind rusting bat-chomping bird-slicing eco-crucifixes for us to pay to clean up) while our infrastructure falls apart.
It’s a win/win for NOAA. No more money wasted doing actual science and gathering data when the data itself undermines the message.
Monitoring is in denial.
Let me guess.
Classic bureaucracy, concentrate spending on the politically expedient fluff.
Restrict spending on core functions(Those that are the mandate of the agency)
Then insist they need more money to carry out those core functions.
Here in Canada, that is called Environment Canada.
Bragging about having spent $4billion researching global warming, while claiming they lacked the manpower and financial resources to rectify known problems with their weather stations and data gathering systems.
If NOAA runs true to form, next you will discover that they have funded a think tank, to research the effects of global warming with $650 million and when the department head is called to account, they will resign from govt, to immediately reappear as Chairman/CEO of the think tank.
Billions and billions and billions spent on CO2 research, papers, grants, green projects, etc. and we have “… the ATO array may already be toast due to budget constraints. …” This is unbelievable!
Would not ARGO have all this covered?
Yeah NOAA stripped a lot of programs to the bone to keep pouring money into the money pit which started as NPOESS and is now JPSS after the Air Force (well known for their stingy nature /sarc) bailed out out the joint military/civilian venture.
I meant to type the Air Force bailed out OF the joint satellite venture. Sorry for the poor proof reading there.
Classic climate research.
Fund the trendy stuff, as wanted by the politicians and green activists.
Starve the essential research, as needed by our civilisation.
As the “science is settled”, there is no longer any need to do the important stuff on climate research. Such is ecoloon logic.
“The array’s troubles began in 2012, when budget cuts pushed NOAA to retire a ship dedicated to performing the annual servicing that keeps the TAO buoys in working order.”
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They probably broke the buoys on purpose so they wouldn’t have to contend with pesky real-world data.
The TAO that can’t be broken is not the eternal TAO.
Speaking of ARGO, how much does NOAA spend on that program per year. About 300 bouys need to be replaced every year, 6 per week, if they last as long as 10 years.
Perhaps their resolution would be to eventually replace the entire array with devices that are also capable of measuring both atmospheric and dissolved CO2 which we all know is the major climate driver. Minor contributors like El Niño and La Niña are inconsequential in the greater scale of climate/weather
/sarc
CO2 may not be the main driver of Climate but it’s study is the main driver of government funding
Why maintain a multi million Dollar system when any old model will do it better. /sarc
How do you tell if a buoy is failing? When the output isn’t as high as the model predicts.
It sounds a lot like the IRS complaint for mo money.
Who needs them, with magic models you can have all the data you ever ‘need’ and never even have to leave the lab.
If the data doesn’t ‘fit’, you must ahhhhh….quit.
So this is how they get around failing to measure the ocean heating that they are sure must be happening.
Stephen Rasey:
I believe I saw a figure of 24 million per year. I assume that’s just the equipment floating out in the ocean – not the people and equipment in the various research centers collecting, processing and distributing it.
peterg:
Argo should cover this, though maybe not as fine a resolution. Not sure.
On a different note:
It’s interesting to me how difficult it is to find aggregate data for the Argo network (i.e. ocean temperature vs time graphs). I have a good idea why 😉
I recently downloaded all the Argo data. It’s about 27 GB and unfortunately there didn’t seem to be an easy bulk download method (I had downloaded 1.2 million ‘profiles’ individually). There may have been a way, I just didn’t find it.
peterg says:
January 28, 2014 at 12:15 pm
Good question, Peter, but sadly the answer is no. The TAO buoys collect data on a host of meteorological variables (temperature, sunshine, longwave radiation, etc.) that the Argo floats don’t touch.
w.
This is not unique to Climate Science&tm;. This is the behavior of every government bureaucracy. There is no glamour in field data collection. There is no public accolades or notoriety. You will never be the next Schnieder or Trenberth. You are just, as Steve McIntyre call them, a specialist known only to other specialists, toiloing in obscurity to produce clean datasets.
No, the real action for the bureaucratic strivers everywhere is … Predictions of Doom. “ZOMG! Our Super Mega Ultra Flops modeling computer edifice has predicted the End of the World as We Know It, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit. Send more money immediately!” That’s how you get your picture on the cover of the Rolling Stone. And when your picture is on the cover, then the people are ok with shoveling more of their money at you,
And it will continue to be this way until we say “Ya basta! No more for you. Go dig ditches for a while, do something useful.”
Many people on WUWT, including myself, have said that solid unarguable data is secondary to computer models. This proves it, as has been said by others on this post, they can spend billions on wind turbines and dodgy climate “research” but when it comes to putting our money where their mouths are, they won’t do it. In the past this was by manipulation of data, now the new one, is by not collecting it in the first place.
Surely this is chump change in the context of their total budget?
Definitely pure bureaucratic politics – cut something high profile/useful and put the hand out for more money. Meanwhile, fat cats and favoured programs continue to flourish.
“So this is how they get around failing to measure the ocean heating that they are sure must be happening.”
Exactly. Now there isn’t that inconvenient data possibly leaking out to the public, before it gets “adjusted” of course.