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North Atlantic and North Pacific Oceans can be derived. The Air 

 Force permitted Dr. Tom Georges, with NOAA's Environmental 

 Technology Laboratory, to use the east coast OTH-B radar for 

 research. Using the radar. Dr. Georges provided information to 

 NOAA's National Hurricane Center (NHC) on wind fields associated 

 with hurricanes during part of the 1994 and 1995 hurricane 

 seasons. NHC's analysis was that the data was a valuable 

 addition to information from satellites to forecast hurricanes. 

 It provided a continuous, broad area presentation of changing 

 surface wind direction not available from satellite data. Both 

 the east and west coast OTH-B radars have now been shut down. 

 But the Air Force is investigating letting Dr. Georges continue 

 his research on an Australian OTH-B radar, as part of a 

 Memorandum of Agreement between the U.S. and Australian Air 

 Forces. 



RQTHRS 



The U.S. Navy still operates ionospheric backscatter radars in 

 support of the counter-drug mission for the Caribbean and Gulf of 

 Mexico region. Called Relocatable Over-The-Horizon Radars 

 (ROTHRs) , these radars do not possess the immense range and area 

 coverage of the Air Force OTH-B radars, but they offer the unique 

 advantage of parallactic data from two radars - one located in 

 Virginia and one in Texas. {A third radar may be opened in 

 Puerto Rico.) The Navy has permitted Dr. Georges to work with 

 the radars on a not-to-interf ere basis with the primary mission. 

 In addition to wind field information over the Caribbean and Gulf 

 of Mexico that is useful to the National Hurricane Center, Dr. 

 Georges has demonstrated the ability to generate surface current 

 vectors that are useful to the U.S. Coast Guard in search and 

 rescue efforts and in predicting oil spill trajectories. In the 

 future. Dr. Georges would like for his work to be designated a 

 secondary mission for the radars, but doing so would make NOAA 

 responsible for a share of operating costs - a financial burden 

 that NOAA cannot accept . 



WORK WITH THE NAVY 



NOAA cooperates closely with the Navy, as evidenced by the 24 

 Memoranda of Understanding (MOUs) and Memoranda of Agreement 

 (uioas) now in effect. Here are a few examples of our cooperation 

 with the Navy. The National Ice Center in Suitland, Maryland is 

 operated jointly by NOAA and the Navy to provide ice forecasts 

 for the safety of mariners and for high latitude operations. 

 NOAA and the Navy cooperate for meteorological forecasting in the 

 Pacific - especially for typhoon warnings. We also cooperate in 

 areas as diverse as environmental modeling, supercomputing 

 capability, oceanographic data archiving (at NOAA's National 

 Oceanographic Data Center) , the use of undersea craft, shared 

 processing of satellite data, ocean science research with the 



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