112 OCEANOGRAPHY 



A-estigate tlie short- and lon^-term variations in the distribution of 

 sea-siirf ace temperatures in the North Pacific, he has to first get these 

 things averaged by 2° squares for each month of each year. He has 

 been at this with several assistants for a couple of years and it will 

 be some years yet before he has all of these charts completed. He 

 has to go through these, edit out the bad observations, make the aver- 

 ages and ])lot tliem up and process them and so on. Although he is 

 using punchcard equi])ment I think really modern data-processing 

 equipment at a central data center could do this thing much more 

 efficiently than having Dr. Sette at Stanford working on the Xorth 

 Pacific and someone else on the South Pacific. 



Mr. Miller. Here is where you have a lot of data that has never 

 been analyzed and coordinated. 



Dr. SciiAEFER. It has never been put in a form where scientists 

 can get it out in the form they want to do tlieir research on. 



Mr. Miller. Do you think Ijesides in this field there are other 

 fields where data is being collected that needs analysis ? 



Dr. ScHAEFER. This is only one example. It has been anticipated 

 that we will have fairly shortl}" not only the survey vessels getting 

 increasingly large quantities of data, but also we hope that we will 

 have at various points in the ocean anchored buoys that are con- 

 tinuously recording various things. These are like the weather sta- 

 tions on land, where the network of weather stations get observations 

 four times a day. With the survey vessels, and with these con- 

 tinuously recording instruments, we are going to have tremendous 

 floods of data coming in. These data in this magnitude can only be 

 processed in any reasonable amount of time by modern data-handling 

 equipment and computing equipment. This is the sort of thing that 

 the Texas Instrument people were referring to yesterday that tliey 

 use to process their geophysical data. If you have 200 buoys, say, 

 sitting out in the various oceans pouring out data continuously, you 

 simply have to handle this by modern data-handling methods, you 

 cannot do it with pencil and paper. 



Now initially the Committee on Oceanography in considering this 

 data center problem recommended that the most economical method for 

 doing this would be to put into an expandable facility in a Federal 

 bureau concerned with technical and scientific matters, and we fur- 

 ther suggested that either the Coast and Oeodetic Survey, or the 

 U.S. Weather Bureau in the Department of Commerce would meet 

 these criteria. We noted at that time that the U.S. Hydrographic 

 Office is also concerned with technical and scientific matters, but it 

 serves the Navy's needs primarily and civilian needs secondarily. Since 

 that chapter of our report was Avritten — in fact, quite recently — we 

 have been infoniied that a plan has been devolved under the auspices 

 of the Interagency Committee on Oceanography to set up a data 

 center at Suitland, jNId., physically adjacent to the U.S. Hydro- 

 graphic Office but administered cooperatively by the Navy, the Coast 

 and Geodetic Survey, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries", the Atomic 

 Energy Commission, «nd the National Science Foundation. 



It is our opinion that this would be a satisfactory way of meeting 

 the requirements for a data center provided it clearly stipulated that 

 this center sej-ves civilian and military needs adequately and on an 

 equal priority basis. 



Mr. Miller. 1 think that is quite significant. 



