The numbers don't add up. When, in 2012, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) retired the Ka'imimoana, a former US Navy ship dedicated to maintaining an array of moored buoys that monitors the equatorial Pacific Ocean, administrators were able to chop roughly US$6 million from the annual NOAA budget. In 2013, the agency says, it spent up to $3 million chartering boats for the same purpose. Those charters have failed to keep pace with the rigorous maintenance requirements, however, and the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array has partially collapsed as a result. The upshot is that, to save a few million dollars, NOAA has left the world partially blind to a phenomenon that can cause tens of billions of dollars in damage.
展开▼
