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
Past temps are here:
http://www.bom.gov.au/oceanography/oceantemp/pastanal.shtml
Thar she blows:
http://www.bom.gov.au/cgi-bin/oceanography/wrap_ocean_analysis.pl?id=IDYOC007&year=2009&month=06
I would be interested in seeing the chain of monies distribution. Wouldn’t you expect an organization (NOAA ? seriously ?) dedicated to the study of climate be starved of funds for a particularly scientific sharp-end data monitoring system.
Yes, I am suggesting that science has become totally corrupted and made the servant of politics. Lysenko in the USSA.
WOW! You mean we might have another 60 degree day in January and not know it?
Tax dollars wasted again.
Yeah sure, blame the people who tell you money doesn’t grow on trees.
Obama being “pro science” was good for a laugh, though.
xanonymousblog says: @ur momisugly January 28, 2014 at 5:27 pm
I would go back ~60 years and look at the 1950 – 1960s more La Niñas than El Niños.
That the climate has shifted gears seems pretty obvious. I would also watch the Antarctic Circumpolar Current and associated wind that drives it. you can see how the cold water from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current some times runs up the coast of South America .
http://www7320.nrlssc.navy.mil/GLBhycom1-12/navo/globalsst_nowcast_anim30d.gif
No one is crediting the man in charge of managing the incompetent managers at NOAA – President Obama. He’s the one who think government manages best is the one that’s the biggest.
Why don’t we get the TAO/TRITON Array farmed out to a university? The Aricebo radio telescope in Puerto Rico got sold to Cornell University, for instance – now managed and re-invested for the greater cause of science. Why not some oceanography minded university, now?
Who needs hard instrumental data when you’ve got
Xbox gamescomputer models?Empirical measurements are just so twentieth century!
This is just unbelieveable. As a retired instrumentation/control systems engineer the lack of maintenance on this strategic system of bouys temp. measurements is totally unacceptable. Perhaps it was a decision between food stamp money and the free Obama phones that made the difference. I’m afraid that our expertise & knowledge base is headed back toward the 19th century.
NOAA annual budget has grown from $4 Billion to $5.5 Billion since 2008.
Pretty good, given the Great Recession that the peons who gave them the Billions have had to deal with over the same period.
With literally _billions_ going into climate models that don’t even come close to producing a useful model after three decades of effort, they can’t even organise their budget to maintain the instruments against which they hope to calibrate their models.
Since the whole modelling effort has been a financial abyss that is where the cuts need be to be made.
The quality and quantity of REAL input data is core of any science. If they cannot maintain the data collection they can no longer claim to be doing science.
The buoys may be redundant because of the Argo float system gives better coverage.
If any climate model were even close to accurate it would be the only one needed. It should then be possible to defund any number of supercomputers and associated facilities and organizations. Any organization wanting to create its own SC might do what one of our universtities here in Virginia did – make one out of a couple of thousand Mac G5 desktops networked together (at a likely cost of around $250.00 each)
I wonder how the annual buoy budget compares to the cost of rescuing the recent ship of fools stuck in non-existent Antarctic ice.
Surely this array should be funded by the whole world??
Plenty of countries out there are able to take up the slack if international cooperation were more important than national pride.
Is it??
chris moffatt,
“If any climate model were even close to accurate it would be the only one needed. ”
Good point.
It is a crime.