Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and maintenance. The committee supports, and encourages the continuation of, NDBC's
recent effort (February 2010 workshop) to engage industry, academia. and other NOAA
agencies for help in solving its problems with DART reliability.
Recommendation:
The committee encourages NDBC to establish rigorous quality control
procedures, perform relentless pre-deployment tests of all equipment, and explore
new maintenance paradigms, such as simpliication of DART mooring deployment and
maintaining a reserve of DART stations for immediate deployment.
Recommendation:
NDBC should improve its efforts at failure analysis, especially through
more vigorous attempts to recover both buoys that have gone “adrift” and the mooring
remnants that are left on site.
Conclusion:
DART presents an outstanding opportunity as a platform to acquire long
time series of oceanographic and meteorological variables for use for climate research and
other nationally important purposes. Potentially a DART buoy could also telemeter data
acoustically from a sealoor seismograph although the demands on DART power would
increase proportionally. The additional power requirements for acoustic and satellite
telemetry would press the current design of the buoy thereby increasing risk to the
primary goal of tsunami detection. Nevertheless, broadening the user base could enhance
the sustainability of the DART program over the long term and future designs should
consider additional sensors. Other programs, such as the coastal sea level network, have
encouraged a broad user base to enhance sustainability of their infrastructure.
Recommendation:
NOAA should encourage access to the DART platform (especially,
use of the acoustic and satellite communications capabilities) by other observational
programs, on a not-to-interfere basis; that is, the primary application (tsunami warning)
justiies the cost, but DART presents an outstanding opportunity as a platform to acquire
long time series of oceanographic and meteorological variables for use for climate
research and other nationally important purposes. Broadening the user base would be
expected to enhance the sustainability of the DART program in the future.
Conclusion:
In a world of limited resources, a strategic decision needs to be made as to
whether it is more important to maintain the current DART network at the highest level of
performance or to focus on improving the DART station reliability.
A irst step could be for NOAA to establish a strategic plan that determines whether (1) it
is most important to maintain the DART II network at the highest level of performance right
now (meaning that the irst priority for resources is maintenance, including funding of costly
ship time to repair and replace inoperative DART stations as soon as possible), or (2) it is most
important that NDBC focus irst on improving DART station reliability, at the possible expense
of maintenance.
