News - Local

Friday, Nov. 06, 2009

New NOAA ship, center celebrated

NOAA officials introduce new research platforms

PASCAGOULA — National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials introduced two new, state-of-the-art platforms Friday that will work together to advance marine and fisheries research.

In back-to-back ceremonies, the NOAA Ship Pisces was commissioned into active service and a reborn Southeast Fisheries Science Center-Mississippi Laboratories was dedicated. The Pisces, a survey ship built at VT Halter Marine in Moss Point, is part of the agency’s effort to modernize its research fleet. The laboratory facility replaces one destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“This is indeed a historic day for NOAA,” said John Oliver, deputy assistant administrator for the agency’s National Marine Fisheries Service. “It is really great to see things come to fruition.”

During commissioning of the 208-foot, Pascagoula-based Pisces, flags were raised over the superstructure as a tug blasted plumes of water skyward in the background and a NOAA P-3 “hurricane hunter” aircraft made a low-altitude flyover.

The ship, the third of four fisheries survey ships in a new class designed to minimize noise transmitted into the water, was named by a seventh-grade class from Sacred Heart School in Southaven.

“Pisces is so advanced and quiet that it is likely fish and other marine animals will never know it’s there. And that’s the whole idea,” said Rear Adm. Jonathan Bailey, director of NOAA’s Commissioned Officer Corps and Office of Marine and Aviation Operations.

Jane Lubchenco, undersecretary of commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, said data collected by the Pisces as it operates in the Gulf of Mexico, Carribean and South Atlantic will be valuable in supporting NOAA’s mission to protect, restore and manage use of ocean resources. In 2008, she said, U.S. fisheries produced 8.3 billion pounds of food with a dockside value of $4.4 billion, including 1.4 billion pounds valued at $856 million from the Gulf.

Lubchenco, a marine ecologist, said the “quiet” technology incorporated into the Pisces has already been proven to produce better survey results for sister ships.

“I know firsthand that the ocean does not always give up her secrets willingly,” she said.

Data from the Pisces and other survey ships will be analyzed at the new 53,000-square-foot laboratory facility.

Constructed at a cost of about $22 million, it will house local branches of four other NOAA operations in addition to the Fisheries Science Center. Mississippi Laboratories Director Lisa Desfosse said the work conducted at the facility will be crucial to making national policy affecting fisheries and conservation in the Gulf.

“We do all of the survey work, and that’s the major part of the science that goes into those decisions,” she said.

Officials praised NOAA employees who, since Hurricane Katrina, have done their work in difficult conditions while spread out in FEMA trailers and rental office space. They will be consolidated in the new building, which houses equipment much more up-to-date than that destroyed by the storm and incorporates a new feature, an environmental laboratory to study ecosystems.

“You take advantage of opportunities, even if they appear to be bad ones when they present themselves,” said NOAA Chief Administrative Officer William Broglie.

Lubchenco said taken together, the Pisces and the new lab give researchers better tools to do work ranging from monitoring fish populations to studying the long-term effects of climate change.

“I look forward to the continuing, very exciting work coming from the ship we commissioned today, the building we dedicated today and the people we celebrate today,” she said.