OCEANOGRAPHY 1 1 1 



representatives of the various agencies, and in their prospectus on this 

 panel they also propose to provide for consultation with the scientific 

 -community. In this particular area I think that our position is that 

 the particular kind of org-anization chosen to brino; about the coordi- 

 nation is of less importance than that there be established some organ- 

 ization. Which particular form is the most desirable I do not feel 

 strono-ly about, and I do not think that my colleagues do. 



Mr. Miller. As far as I am concerned, being one of the authors 

 of these bills, I can feel strongly about it. I want to do sometliing 

 to draw you fellows out. 



Dr. ScuAP^FER. I leather feel in that particular area that perhaps 

 the Oceanographic Committee of the Fedei-al Council may hanclle 

 it quite adequately. However, the question of legislation on the 

 subject gets into the matter of committees re|)orting both to the Presi- 

 dent and the Congress and this is an area we are not very experienced 

 in. My personal feeling is this particular function probably could 

 be handled by the Federal Council Committee. As I say, I would 

 not urge any particular thing strongly. I would urge some mech- 

 anism be established fairly promptly. 



Mr. ]Mtller. Getting back to the story that I told, I am just a 

 thinker. I am tiying to get you fellows to give a little guidance. 



Dr. ScHAEFER. Turning now to the matter of the data center, we 

 feel that there is a very great need for a national data center to serve 

 adequately all the public needs, ])articularly the civilian require- 

 ments of govei-nmental agencies, scientihc institutions and individual 

 scientists. 



The need for such a center has become acute. An extremely large 

 volume of physical, chemical, and biological data are continually 

 being collected in many areas by diiferent groups for different pur- 

 poses. Much of these data remain unpublished, stored in the files 

 of both governmental and nongovernmental institutions. I would 

 like to emphasize that more is required, however, than simply a de- 

 pository, that is, a sei'vice facility for central storage like a library. 

 It is also necessai-y for a data center to undertake some degi'ee of 

 evaluation and quality control of the observations, preliminary proc- 

 essing, and summarization in convenient form for use by researchers, 

 preparation of regular data summaries, catalogs, and atlases for those 

 kinds of information widely used. A central agency, using the most 

 modern data -processing and computing equipment, could do this 

 preliminary processing job, summarizing job, much more efficiently, 

 rapidly and more chea])ly than different scientists working on differ- 

 ent pieces of the ocean individually. 



Mr. Miller. You want something more than just an archives. 



Dr. SciiAEFER. Something more than just an archives. The data 

 needs to be put into a comparable form, to be edited to eliminate the 

 "bad" observations. A good exam])le of that is this : One of my col- 

 leagues at Stanford I^niversity, Dr. Sette, at the present time is 

 working on the sea surface temperature data of the North Pacific 

 Ocean. Now, he has obtained these data from the archives of the 

 Hydrographic Office and the weather data center at Asheville, N.C., 

 in the form of {)unchcards, the original observations, so he has quite 

 a few million cards for all of the various sea-surface temperature 

 observations made by merchant ships, research ships, and so on, over 

 the last couple of decades. In order to put these in a form to in- 



