Custom-Made Weather Maps Critical to Naval Operations.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

In 1994, the USNS Littlehales (T-AGS 52)--a U.S. Navy oceanographic ship--completed a survey of the 360-kilometer coastline of the tiny, former communist country of Albania. The research provided detailed information on such subjects as tides, currents and sea depths that was valuable at the time to the fledgling Albanian economy.

For the Navy, however, the real value of that information came five years later when U.S. ships cruised those waters while launching aircraft and missiles against Yugoslavia, according to Rear Adm. Richard D. West, oceanographer of the Navy.

During that conflict, West's command used information from that survey to produce full-color, large-scale charts of the Adriatic. Special "mobile environmental teams (METs) from Navy bases in Norfolk, Va., and Rota, Spain--placed onboard individual ships during the operation--used it to provide tailor-made forecasts to help commanders cope with the region's notoriously poor and constantly changing weather.

"Without that data, the whole naval part of that operation could have been disastrous," West told National Defense. Without accurate information about the Balkan coastline, ships could have run aground, even sunk, he noted. Precision-guided munitions would have been much less effective.

Providing ship commanders with enough information about the sea to help them to avoid such disasters and prevail against the nations enemies is a major part of West's job.

The oceanographer of the Navy--head-quartered in the century-old Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C.--leads his service's effort to study every aspect of the world's oceans that might influence the outcome of military operations.

Under his auspices, more than 3,000 military and civilian personnel are at work, gathering oceanographic information around the globe. With an annual budget of $427 million, they operate the Naval Meteorological and Oceanographic Command (METOC), at the Stennis Space Center, in Mississippi; two major supercomputer facilities at Bay St. Louis, Miss., and Monterey, Calif.; more than 30 oceanographic centers and detachments as far away as the island of Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, and Keflavik, Iceland, in the North Atlantic, and aboard dozens of ships.

Navy oceanography also includes astronomers pinpointing positions of the stars for navigational purposes at observatories in Washington; Flagstaff and Anderson Mesa, Ariz.; Colorado Springs, Cob., and Cerro Tololo, Chile.

To chart the world's seas, the Navy has been modernizing its research fleet. It now has eight survey ships, all operated for the oceanographer by...