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GPO and NOAA Partner To Increase Permanent Public Access To NOAA Publications
GPO recently announced that it had entered into a partnership with NOAA to catalog 47,000+ NOAA documents to the Catalog of Government Publications (CGP) and add permanent URLs (PURLs) in those records to NOAA’s digital repository.
FGI wholeheartedly supports this effort especially given that executive branch documents are woefully lacking in the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information. We hope that this effort will spur other executive agencies to work with GPO to expand the National Collection for greater public access to and preservation of important US government publications.
If you want to read more about the history of “unreported” documents, please see my article “’Issued for Gratuitous Distribution’: The History of Fugitive Documents and the FDLP” to learn more about the historic difficulties with collecting, cataloging, and distributing executive branch agency documents in the Federal Depository Library Program (FDLP).
U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) in partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Central Library is working to add more than 47,000 unique items published by NOAA authors and grantees to the National Collection of U.S. Government Public Information. GPO shares NOAA’s goal of providing additional avenues to access Government research and making these documents more discoverable to the public. GPO will add the NOAA Institutional Repository (IR) to the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP) and create permanent URLs, ensuring documents in NOAA’s IR are available digitally for permanent public access….
…Items that will be added to the National Collection and digitally preserved date back to 1970, the year NOAA was founded. They include NOAA’s reports to Congress, strategic and policy documents, white papers, conference proceedings, Federally-funded scholarly research, and more. While many of these items have historically been available in print formats at Federal depository libraries, they will now be available digitally through the CGP for easier and wider access.
Items the public may find particularly interesting from this collection are:
Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act (Weather Act) Collection, including documents describing efforts to improve hurricane, tornado, tsunami, and subseasonal to seasonal forecasting
Endangered Species Act Section 7 Biological Opinions
Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Restoration Collection, with documents related to NOAA’s response and restoration work in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill NOAA Annual Science Report
Longtime Climate Science Denier Hired At NOAA
Here’s another example of the Trump administration naming people to political posts in federal agencies in order to damage and destroy public trust in those agencies. This time it’s the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which, among other responsibilities, runs the National Weather Service and produces all sorts of information and data on climate to “help people understand and prepare for climate variability and change.” The administration just named David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology and long-time climate change denier affiliated with the conservative astroturf Heartland Institute, as deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. It’s going to take many years for executive agencies across the federal government to come back from the damage created by this administration.
David Legates, a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science, has been hired for a top position at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Legates confirmed to NPR that he was recently hired as NOAA’s deputy assistant secretary of commerce for observation and prediction. The position suggests that he reports directly to Neil Jacobs, the acting head of the agency that is in charge of the federal government’s sprawling weather and climate prediction work.
Neither Legates nor NOAA representatives responded to questions about Legates’ specific responsibilities or why he was hired. The White House also declined to comment.
Legates has a long history of using his position as an academic scientist to publicly cast doubt on climate science. His appointment to NOAA comes as Americans face profound threats stoked by climate change, from the vast, deadly wildfires in the West to an unusually active hurricane season in the South and East.
Global temperatures have already risen nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 19th century as a result of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Warming is happening the fastest at the Earth’s poles, where sea ice is melting, permafrost is thawing and ocean temperatures are heating up, with devastating effects on animals and humans alike.
National Weather Service under risk of privatization. John Oliver has more
Talking about the weather is supposed to be the one safe topic that people from all stripes can talk about. But John Oliver ruins that — in an extremely funny and informative way of course! He explains the importance of the National Weather Service (NWS), which is a sub-agency of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The NWS makes all of its weather forecasts and climate data openly available for free and also shares data and modeling with other weather services around the world through its membership in the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). One could argue that the National Weather Service is among the most critical government services and a global public good.
Over the last 15-20 years however, there has been a concerted push by private companies to get into the weather game. Whereas companies like AccuWeather and the Weather Channel would in the past use NWS data and add value to it, today, according to Andrew Blum — who wrote the recently published book “The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast” —
“…you’ve got companies running their own models, deploying their own observing systems,” and as Oliver points out, acting as gatekeepers to weather data. Check out Blum’s interview on a recent PBS Newshour for more context and by all means, watch Oliver’s piece below.
The most recent move at privatization of the weather is when the Trump administration named Barry Myers, the ex-CEO of AccuWeather, for the dual post of NOAA Administrator and Under Secretary for Oceans and Atmosphere, Department of Commerce and include oversight of the National Weather Service. His nomination was submitted in October, 2017 and renewed in January, 2018 and again in 2019. His nomination was stalled for quite a while, but in April of this year, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted 14-12 along party lines to move Myers’ nomination forward.
Myers’ nomination is extremely problematic for 2 reasons: 1) He has gone on the record in support of privatizing the weather service — in 2005, he and his brother gave money to then-Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) who “introduced legislation aimed at curtailing government competition with private weather services”; and 2) AccuWeather this year agreed to pay a substantial fine for “sexual harassment and a hostile work environment” while Myers was AccuWeather’s chief executive. Is this really the person we want providing oversight to the National Weather Service and NOAA as a whole?!
Cuts to NOAA Climate Change Information Gathering
One of the ways that the government decreases public access to important information is to just stop collecting it. The Trump administration has proposed cutting research funding to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a leading climate science agency. The biggest cut would be to NOAA’s satellite division, known as National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, which includes a key repository of climate and environmental information, the National Centers for Environmental Information. (Washington Post By Steven Mufson, Jason Samenow and Brady Dennis March 3, 2017.)
NOAA image puzzler and the “fugitive of the day”
NOAA’s Earth Observatory does an image puzzler of the month where they post Landsat 8 images from their Operational Land Imager (OLI) satellite. April’s image turned out to be a twofer: a very cool image of South Korean seaweed cultivation AND in the citation was a fugitive document “Seaweed Cultivation of Korea” published by NOAA as part of their Korea-US Aquaculture site. See Colossal “Fascinating Satellite Photos of Seaweed Farms in South Korea” for more images. Please go to the LostDocs blog if you’d like to find out more about fugitive documents and how to be a fugitive docs hunter.
The dark squares that make up the checkerboard pattern in this image are fields of a sort—fields of seaweed. Along the south coast of South Korea, seaweed is often grown on ropes, which are held near the surface with buoys. This technique ensures that the seaweed stays close enough to the surface to get enough light during high tide but doesn’t scrape against the bottom during low tide.
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 acquired this image of seaweed cultivation in the shallow waters around Sisan Island on January 31, 2014. Home to a thriving aquaculture industry, the south coast of South Korea produces about 90 percent of the country’s seaweed crop. The waters around Sisan are not the only place where aquaculture is common. View the large image to see how ubiquitous seaweed aquaculture is along the coast in Jeollanam-do, the southernmost province on the Korean peninsula.
Two main types of seaweed are cultivated in South Korea: Undaria (known as miyeok in Korean, wakame in Japanese) and Pyropia (gim in Korean, nori in Japanese). Both types are used generously in traditional Korean, Japanese, and Chinese food.
via Seaweed Farms in South Korea : Image of the Day. HT to ColossalFascinating Satellite Photos of Seaweed Farms in South Korea!
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