For the last few years the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has been an also-ran among federal science programs. But if NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco gets her way with Congress, the agency will join the front ranks in 2011.
The agency was excluded from the America Competitiveness Initiative (a budget doubling for the physical sciences begun by the Bush Administration) and left with crumbs in the massive 2009 stimulus package. Observers wondered how a new Administration so supportive of environmental science and climate research could ignore an agency intended to be a good steward of the air and sea. (NOAA received a 9% budget increase last year, for example, but its satellite procurement efforts got the biggest share.) The second-rate status for ocean research was all the more ironic given that the president had put a world-renowned marine ecologist in the driver's seat.
But now Lubchenco has made her move, and the agency is poised for a huge investment in science. Yesterday's proposed 14% increase, to $5.5 billion, for the agency as a whole would be the largest increase in NOAA's budget in a decade. Research efforts at the agency get a 7% increase overall, to $522 million; big winners include earth-system modeling, research on marine pathogens, and studies related to ocean acidification. Each reflects priorities that go beyond the agency's bread-and-butter work of regulating fisheries and monitoring weather. Overall, climate work at the Department of Commerce, most of which is at NOAA, would rise by 21% under the new budget.