IV. Assessment 



In requesting NACOA to undertake this review, the Director of the 

 National Science Foundation raised five specific questions (see Appendix 

 3). Our answers to these questions follow. 



Has the I DOE program been responsive' to the 1969 guidelines under 

 which it was established? 



To the extent that an explicit set of initial guidelines existed, they 

 may be found in the six goals enunciated by the Vice President in 

 October 1969, and reproduced here in Appendix 2. 



The first of these goals, directed toward assessing and predicting 

 man-induced and natural modifications in the oceans, identifying damag- 

 ing eflects of waste disposal at sea, and comprehending the interaction of 

 various levels of marine life in order to prevent depletion or extinction of 

 valuable species as a result of man's activities, has been addressed by 

 IDOE's Environmental Quality and Living Resources programs. 



The second goal, calling for improved physical and mathematical 

 models of the ocean and atmosphere to yield accurate, timely, and geo- 

 graphically precise environmental forecasts, has been addressed by the 

 Environmental Forecasting program. 



The third goal, concerned with the acquisition of needed knowledge 

 of seabed topography, structure, physical and dynamic properties, and 

 resource potential, has been addressed by the Seabed Assessment program. 



The fourth goal listed by the Vice President, concerning the design 

 and deployment of an ocean monitoring system, has not been directly 

 addressed by NSF's IDOE program. Ocean monitoring systems are 

 extremely expensive, and NSF could not have taken on this task effec- 

 tively with the resources available. Ocean monitoring has again attracted 

 attention within the past year in the context of the need to acquire 

 global ocean data to assess the likelihood of climatic change and to assist 

 in the development of climatic models, and it is possible that as part of 

 a national climate program, or in conjunction with the Global Atmos- 

 pheric Research Program, the job of designing and implementing an 

 ocean monitoring system will be incorporated as part of a new Federal 



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