Ocean, Weather & Climate Forum 2022 Review- Part 2

This article is the second in a three part series. If you have not read the first installment then I recommend that you do that before continuing here, see: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/ocean-weather-climate-forum-2022-review-nathan-heazlewood/

Highlights from presentations (part 2)

The second presentation from NOAA: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration highlighted some of the key points that I raised in the previous article, around FAIR data principles as well as touching on collaboration and data processing. Ken Buja talked about NOAAs plans:

“create a one-stop shop data discovery tool for all of NOAAs benthic data”

“recently the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a memorandum to ensure that published science and data are immediately available to the American public”?

Key Hyperlinks

My fellow Pacific Island resident Michael Omohundro from the Hawaií Green Grown UN Local 2030 Hub spoke about the Hub that they have established to monitor Hawaií's progress against the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Coming from a coastal island community, and also myself having connections with many other Pacific islands this talk hit home for me. As Michael put it:

“Islands are on the front lines of climate change: we are already experiencing sea level rise, we are already experiencing beach erosion” “If there is 3 ft sea level rise then the local damage will be at a value of 2 Billion Dollars”

Key Hyperlinks

Madison Broddle spoke about NASA's POWER initiative which provides information and analysis about solar and meteorological data, which is useful for renewable energy planning, efficient building design, and agriculture. A key focus of Madison's talk was about how they could make this data more accessible and useful to other organisations. She stated that a key objective that they have is that:

“data is well documented, easy to find and easy to download”

Key Hyperlinks

Analise Keeney spoke about NOAAs planning for flood events, particularly related to high tides. A particularly interesting aspect of this for me was the historic records that NOAA has and how NOAA utilises these to provide evidence of the trends of sea level rise and to extrapolate those into the future. One impressive fact that Analise mentioned regards NOAAs tide measurement stations:

“some of these stations have been in operation for more than 150 years”

Key Hyperlinks:

In recent years health has been a topic of interest for everyone around the world. Jennifer Boehnert provided insights about the work of NSF NCAR - The National Center for Atmospheric Research with respect to atmospheric pollution. Thankfully this is not a major issue in my country however I was surprised to learn from this presentation that:

“Air quality in the United States has dramatically improved over the past decades, yet exposure to air pollution is still associated with 100,000- 200,000 deaths annually”

Key Hyperlinks:

TCarta is a company that works on bathymetric data collection in the coastal zone. Kyle Goodrich outlined his company's approach to using satellite based technology to augment other forms of hydrographic survey in the difficult coastal and tidal zones. TCarta has been working worldwide to aid hydrographic offices to overcome the challenges that this zone creates. Another interesting aspect of this work is as Kyle mentioned:

“our work is relevant to the UN Sustainable Development Goals”

Dave Bernstein from Geodynamics/ NV5 Geospatial spoke about a common issue for many geospatial professionals: management of complex data capture initiatives and processing large volumes of data. Dave outlined some large projects that his company had completed and the tools and approaches that they had used to manage these. One survey:

“surveyed 700 square nautical miles within a short 3 and a half months”

Key Hyperlinks

Emily Meriam from Esri presented the Wildfire Aware app. Which is an app provided by Esri using curated datasets to help aid the public with understanding situations and locations regarding wildfires in the United States. This initiative contributes to a key concept that Emily mentioned:

“we know that the impacts of climate change are inevitable and it is our responsibility to communicate our science to the public and to help people that are impacted make informed decisions and take action”

Key Hyperlinks

NV5 Geospatial is a company that works on hydrospatial modeling. Alexa Ramirez gave a presentation outlining the dashboards that they have developed to communicate effectively with their clients. She mentioned the feedback that they have received:

“being able to access updates ‘live’ was super helpful for our clients.”

Part 3 of this article is available here: