Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations (FOCI)

Ned Cokelet, Al Hermann, Art Kendall, Mark Koehn, Mike Lemon, Allen Macklin, Ann Matarese, Jeff Napp, Ron Reed, Beth Sinclair, Cyndy Tynan, and Dave Kachel (rapporteur)

• Mike Lemon, PMEL/OERD, was recently detailed to Seattle from Newport. Mike will assist Phyllis Stabeno and work in ship operations and planning. Mike will be taking over the charter part of operations for the PMEL part of FOCI operations. Mike will become Executive Officer of the NOAA Ship Miller Freeman in August.

• Steve Hammond is representing FOCI at an OAR/NMFS retreat in La Jolla today and tomorrow.   The purpose of the workshop is to explore ways to increase interactions between NMFS and OAR.

• Workshop on Recent Conditions in the Bering Sea - This workshop, sponsored by FOCI,  will take place November 9 and 10 on the NOAA Seattle campus. About 100 people will be invited to participate.

• SEBSCC Annual PI Meeting, Saturday, October 24, 1998, Fairbanks, Alaska

• SEBSCC Phase II request for proposals supplemental announcement will be published in the Federal Register tomorrow.  Proposals are being accepted in the next 30 days, with the closing date November 9.  Researchers who previously submitted proposals for Phase II research need not respond to this supplemental announcement.

• Ric Brodeur and shipmates recently returned from a juvenile pollock cruise on the Russian research ship Professor Kaganovsky. On the cruise scientists did habitat work and monitoring station assessment. Storms were a problem for part of the cruise. The ship well equipped for acoustics and trawling. There are problems with plankton sampling and CTD acquisition, partly because the winches have no fine control and 50m/minute is the slow speed. The plankton net deployment is in a poor location and the ship does not handle well for maintaining a 45° wire angle.  About a third of the CTD stations will need to be scrapped. CTD data on the middle shelf is problematic because of stratification.  During the cruise samples were taken from either side of a visible coccolithophore "front."

• The Canadian Ice Breaker Sir Wilfrid Laurier is now recovering FOCI moorings from the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska.  This is the final cruise of the FY1998 season.

• Juvenile pollock abundance during July 1998 was the lowest in the last four years based on samples collected aboard the Japanese research vessel Oshoro Maru.

• Not all of this season's cruise reports are complete on the web.  Kurt Zegowitz is compiling a list of deficiencies for the Field Operations Leaders to review.  The web versions will be the official record of FOCI's field season.

• 1999 field season:  A tentative schedule for 1999 ship operations is available from the FOCI web site http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/foci/. The Miller Freeman is expected to complete repairs in March.  For the February mooring cruise, a replacement vessel will be used, perhaps, the Laurier or the Thompson.  The first FOCI cruise aboard the Freeman  is scheduled for April.  FOCI will make extensive use of the UNOLS vessel Wecoma through June.

FOCI and NMFS Stock Assessment scientists are exploring formal linkage of biophysical data used to formulate the FOCI recruitment forecast directly into the stock assessment model.  Initial findings were presented at the Lowell Wakefield Symposium on Ecosystem Considerations in Fisheries Management last month.

Dr. William Fox, NMFS, will present "The Science Program at the National Marine Fisheries Service" at the next meeting of the Ocean Studies Board of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science.  The Office of Science and Technology would like to showcase some of the outstanding research being conducted at NMFS.  Toward that end, FOCI will provide information on recruitment forecasting and recent conditions in the Bering Sea.

The next FOCI PI meeting will be held at 10 a.m., Thursday, November 12, 1998, in the Cloud Chamber (3/2065).

Please mail corrections and addenda to the FOCI Coordinator.
 

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