Summary: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announces a second availability of grant funds for Fiscal Year 2004. The purpose of this notice is to provide the general public with a single source of program and application information related to the Agency?s competitive grant offerings, and it contains the information about those programs required to be published in the Federal Register. This second omnibus notice is designed to replace the multiple...

Excerpt: Honorable Committee Members, We are writing in response to a call for public comment by the Commission concerning the development of a national policy on the management and protection of underwater cultural heritage. As practicing underwater archaeologists each with more than 25 years of experience, we are delighted that underwater cultural heritage is being viewed as a resource that merits proactive stewardship. While shipwrecks have become the most controversi...

Excerpt: Oceans general circulation models predict that global warming may cause a decrease in the oceanic O2 inventory and an associated O2 out gassing. An independent argument is presented here in support of this prediction based on observational evidence of the ocean?s biogeochemical response to natural warming. On time scales from seasonal to centennial, natural O2 flux heat flux ratios are shown to occur in a range of 2 to 10 nmol of O2 per joule of warming, with la...

Excerpt: NGS computes improvements to the Global Positioning System (GPS) orbits in order to achieve an accuracy of 7 cm, Root Mean Square (RMS), and is working to attain an accuracy of 5 cm RMS. NGS distributes orbit data in a time frame to meet users? requirements, including a rapid product (8-14 cm accuracy) available within 16 hours after data collection, and a more accurate product available within 7 to 10 days of data collection. Other orbit products include improv...

Excerpt: Dear Commissioners, On behalf of the American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), I am pleased to submit the appended comments prepared by our Public Policy Committee. These comments should be viewed not as a consensus of our roughly 3800 members, but rather as the opinion of a panel of experts chosen from our membership analogous to an NRC report. The report s preparers are listed on its cover page, but the preparers have interviewed a much wider spec...