Chapter IV 



DESCRIBING AND PREDICTING 

 THE OCEAN ENVIRONMENT 



Our knowledge of the ocean environment and its inhabitants has 

 been greatly enriched by the research and exploration of the past 

 decade. The ability to describe, monitor, and predict the flow of 

 energy and matter within the ocean, and the migrations of oceanic 

 life, continues to be a central theme in this national effort. The 

 products of much of this activity are maps and charts, and analyses 

 and forecasts, of conditions in the atmosphere above and in the ocean 

 beneath the air-sea interface, and of the interactions between them. 

 The tools are new platforms, sensorsf and other advances in 

 technology applied to observation of the atmosphere and of the 

 oceans and its life, and the mountain of marine environmental data 

 that constant observation must produce. Whatever our use of the 

 marine environment or its resources — whether as a medium of 

 transportation, battlefield, game preserve, source of food or 

 minerals, or playground — the products, and thus the tools, are an 

 absolute condition of success. 



Mapping and Charting 



Cartographic representations of the ocean basins and their 

 boundaries have long been the traditional way of depicting the sea, 

 and one which has lost none of its importance. But the uses of these 

 products, and the products themselves, have changed. In addition to 

 navigation charts, Federal cartographers are constructing 

 bathymetric and geophysical maps of the sea floor, maps showing 

 inundation levels for low-lying coastal areas, and various types of 

 limited-edition maps for living and non-living resource investiga- 

 tions. These maps and charts must be updated or corrected from time 

 to time, as what they depict is changed by man and nature, or as new 

 data reveals deficiencies. And, as in many other operations, 

 advances in map and chart production lead toward automa- 

 tion — automation from shipboard data acquisition to the finished 

 product. 



NOAA's National Ocean Survey Ship Researcher— a participant in the Mid- 

 Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE). 



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