MR. BRIDGEMAN: Todd Bridgeman. Director of marine operations for NOAA. MR. VEENTJER: John Veentjer. Executive director of the Marine Exchange Puget Sound. MS. PELISH: Kathy Pelish. of Salish Sea Trading Co-Op. We were pure shared effort at moving local goods by using wind and tides. It's on hold now, but we did not sail without checking the NOAA forecast. So, thank you, NOAA. CHAIR HANSON: Well, thank you, everyone for introducing yourselves. That's helpful. We also expect to have two Panel members join us via phone, Larry Atkinson and Anne McIntyre. So, typically, we have very good participation by our Panel members. Obviously, coming from -- this is more for your benefit, Panel members, is that coming from all over the country, all the very diverse backgrounds. But
past year in 2016. It's a cost effective way for federal agencies to share survey data with each other, but also with the public. This slide shows a detailed flow chart, kind of explaining how that whole thing how eHydro works. So, you're taking the framework for the channels that we have, the actual survey data, putting it together and you've got a lot of outputs, and a lot of different customers that use the different types. So, obviously we like -- we're very concerned and interested in the condition plots that go along with different projects, and then we have NOAA reports and the channel indices. So, this information is then available on the internet. You can pull it down in these different formats, and like I said, for the public, as well as for the agencies, and it comes in -- you know, some of it is PDFs, documents
workforce in the nation, as a lofty goal, and this also focuses on our IT infrastructure. So, I'm going to move through this. Again, it's by the goals and roughly by the objectives we have in the plan. I'm not holding strictly to that, to try to tell a little bit of a story. On this slide, I'm not going to list all the customers, you know, our traditional customers, you guys are all pretty much familiar with those. But some of the new ones we've identified over the last few years is the Reinsurance Association of America and some water quality boards. These are organizations we didn't really know used our information or how they used the information, and they didn't really know who we were. So, building those relationships are important to both sides. In terms of direct customer engagement, a few years ago, really in parallel
amount of funding to do some seasonal gauging and we've actually started a data collection effort. It's a seven year effort, and this year was the first year. So, as that moves along, in the future we need to, you know, start to educate people and communicate out what this is going to mean to people. But we also have a tidal epoch update coming. Every 25 years, we'll look to see what kind of changes there's been in the sea level, and do we need to make adjustments to our tidal datum, so that they're still relevant, and I'm going to -- I'm going to guess pretty confidently here that we're going to have to do that. Vdatum, our main role is to do the tide gauging surveys to reduce the uncertainty in the models. We've done a couple of multi-year projects in the New England Northeast and the Pacific Northwest the few last years. A couple new models have been rolled out in the areas there
campaign together. So, sort of out of the blue on my first week on the job, we got 80 letters from the Congresswoman Niki Tsongas, all the way down to the guy that runs the pizza store, asking for an -- larger scale chart. So, this just doesn't happen, and it was really a really well integrated story. So, I want to pass that on and because it, and so, we -- we are -- turns out we had all the data nearly, and have now put together a larger scale chart and it's out in time for the recreation season this year. So, that's kind of a fun, good, new story. But it just happened that those people got their act together and wrote to us and made it easy. There are probably hundreds of other coastal areas that could be -- that could also benefit from -- from better charting. So, I added a couple slides form the -- these are mostly for reference afterwards, but
just NOAA's notice to mariners, but you know, notice to mariners tells me when a bridge isn't opening. And so you know, Main Street Bridge in Jacksonville that I just went through went from on-demand to opening every four hours. Trust me when I tell you, that makes a big difference. And we're one of the few people -- we read all 17 districts every week and we -- we say we put the notice in notice to mariners. Because what we do is we go through the notice to mariners and find the places that are new that we don't have in our database already, and we put a hazard marker. Or we update the bridge that says when -- what the changes are. We do that every single week and it is a huge job. I -- and by the way, every single district uses a different format. You know, I've begged the Coast Guard, give me -- RADM SMITH: You noticed that too, huh? (Laughter.)