NOAA administrator visits Nome

By Peter Loewi
“I tell people that our agency is here to save the world, and I mean it,” Dr. Rick Spinrad said. The Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration visited Nome last week as part of a 10-day tour of Alaska. On this trip, he visited Juneau, Kenai, Homer, Anchorage, and after Nome was headed to Fairbanks. He gave a Strait Science presentation about NOAA’s Arctic Goals, met with tribes and city officials and toured the Port of Nome.
“The leading edge in terms of impacts on climate change, on fisheries, on ocean conditions, is right here, right here in Alaska,” he said.
Spinrad, who was sworn in as the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmospheres and the Administrator of NOAA in June 2021, started by talking about how he came to be where is today, both career-wise and geographically. In 1975, before graduate school in Oregon studying ocean sciences, he made it as far as Beaver Creek in Yukon, Canada. “I couldn’t hitchhike any further, and it teased me. I wanted to get to Alaska,” he said. Throughout his career he made it many times to the Alaska, but this was his first visit to Nome.
After a career as a researcher with the Navy, Spinrad ended up running the National Oceans Services, a branch of NOAA. It was there, he said, that he got hooked on “understanding the environment for the benefit of people in terms of lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles.”
Last year, when he was interviewed for the position to lead NOAA, he told Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo that there were three things he wanted to do. First, he said, changes in the climate are happening, so let’s establish a climate information service, and make the nation climate ready by 2030. Next, because NOAA is housed in the Department of Commerce, how can they build economic opportunities and “environmental intelligence,” as he called it. Third, it’s important to build equity into everything that NOAA does. NOAA was not representative of the stakeholders and users of the information they put out, especially the most vulnerable.
Using the example of the Weather Channel and other members of the $10 billion commercial weather economy – all of which rely on NOAA data – Spinrad believes there’s an opportunity to build a new $100 billion Blue Economy for environmental services, and all that needs to be extracted from the oceans are numbers. Holding up the front page of last week’s Nugget and pointing to an article on Harmful Algal Blooms, he talked about the importance and value for insurance and reinsurance companies, emergency management, and public health officials, of being able to forecast such events.
Moving on to explaining what he meant about equity in services, he gave another example. How would a sea ice forecast be useful to walrus hunters? “How do we know what the right place to move a village to is?” he asked. Having spent the morning before his presentation at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, he said that NOAA needs to do a better job of developing robust mechanisms to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into their modeling. This can only be done through better engagement.
NOAA has six branches, and Spinrad ran briefly through all of them. There are the National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the National Oceans Service, the National Weather Service, the Office of Marine and Aviation Operations and the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. Together, they have 16 satellites, 15 ships and nine aircraft; there are also 321 officers in the NOAA Corps, a uniformed service, who serve across the federal government. He responded to a question about the budget saying that to accomplish all of what they are legally required to do would take about $15 billion, but their most recent budget was only $7 billion.
NOAA produces ocean charts and maps salmon genetics, among many things, but it isn’t without challenges. Spinrad used the word “extraordinary” in describing the backlog in ocean surveys and the difficulty in making weather observations across Alaska, and talked about the possible technological solutions, such as fish counts being conducted by underwater drones.
He summed it up before taking questions. “We’re about science, service, and stewardship. We’re trying to impact lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles.”
There were a lot of questions and comments, both from people in the room and those who participated online. Everyone was appreciative of the presentation, and there were equally as many suggestions.
Many of the questions were about coordination with others. Three different participants asked how NOAA coordinated with three very different entities: tribes, the Department of Defense and Russia. Spinrad explained that they’re looking at better connectivity with tribes, including a new pilot project with the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium on climate resiliency, and was open to suggestions on how engagement with Sea Grant, for example, could be expanded.
NOAA also has a responsibility to support the Department of Defense in domestic applications, he said, noting that the National Ice Center, a collaboration between the Navy, the Coast Guard and NOAA, has been around since 1995. He had a “very meaningful” discussion with General David Nahom, the new head of the Alaska Command, while in Anchorage, and talked about how he felt NOAA’s capabilities weren’t adequately present at the table. A lot of those discussions, he said, hinge on services out of Nome.
He didn’t have an answer for how best to address staffing at National Weather Service sites across the region, but said they were looking at potential solutions. “Here in Alaska, there has to be close alignment between what we do and what DoD needs, and that’s another part of the discussion,” he said, hoping to bring up “environmental domain awareness” with Alaska Command and the new Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies.
Spinrad said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine put a halt to communication, but there is recognition that dialogue on fisheries management, for example, needs to happen. He has been advocating for a comprehensive National Arctic Strategy which would combine and build upon existing defense and research strategies to include natural resource management and could serve as a basis for engagement with other Arctic countries.
Suggestions from the audience were equally wide ranging, and included expanding the Northern Trawl Survey into the Chukchi Sea to help monitor the impact climate change is having on species migration and adapting the “lives, livelihoods, and lifestyles” mantra to better fit Alaska Natives and other Arctic communities.
Dr. Barb Amarok asked what here to save the world really means, though. Marine mammals are dying, birds are dying, industrial and commercial shipping, mining, and transportation infrastructure development are all increasing. What active steps is NOAA taking to protect the land and water, she asked.
Spinrad explained that NOAA has a strong regulatory role, too, with an office of law enforcement, but acknowledged it wasn’t enough. “I’m comfortable we have the foundation and a basis for carrying that out, but it’s probably not sufficient in the light of some of the impacts that we’re seeing both from pollution and from climate change and from development,” he said.
Others doubled down. Bob Metcalf pointed out the Inuit Circumpolar Council uses the phrase “rightsholder” instead of “stakeholder” for the purposes of dialogue, and Nancy Mendenhall asked if there is a contact going forward for subsistence issues.
“Short answer,” Spinrad said, “is yes.” There is already a start, but again he stated he knew it wasn’t sufficient. “You have my commitment to addressing it.”