U.S. Department of Commerce / NOAA	/ OAR /  PMEL  / OERD\  \ NMFS / AFSC / RACE/	FOCI
	Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations

ATTENDING

Ned Cokelet, Al Hermann, Art Kendall, Mark Koehn, Allen Macklin, Jeff Napp, Jim Overland, Ron Reed, Beth Sinclair, Phyllis Stabeno, Carol DeWitt (rapporteur)

• Reports of Oceanographic Cruises and Oceanographic Programs (ROSCOP) -- A metadatabase exists for about 18,000 research cruises conducted since the 1960s.  More information can be obtained from the ICES ROSCOP site on the web at http://www.ices.dk/ocean/roscop/roscopmain.htm.  Users can also search the metadatabase from that site. A discussion was held regarding whether FOCI should participate in this metadatabase, and, if so, whether someone should be assigned to submit past ROSCOPs for all FOCI cruises.  Allen Macklin will download the ROSCOP form and make it available through the field operations planning segment of the FOCI home page.

• Departure of Kurt Zegowitz -- LT(jg) Kurt Zegowitz will be leaving FOCI to join the NOAA Ship Cobb in approximately one month.  His replacement, LT Jerry Adams, will arrive in August.

• Allen Macklin has prepared a short proposal to Sea Grant.  The proposal is to establish a regional NOAA/OAR metadatabase as an on-line tool for research in the marine and coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest.  Initially, the project will target data from regional (Alaska, Washington, Oregon) Sea Grant research, the west coast office of the National Undersea Research Program, and PMEL.

• Phyllis Stabeno, Jim Overland, Nick Bond, Jeff Napp and Calvin Mordy are submitting a proposal to GLOBEC.  The proposal is for biophysical moorings and drifters to study cross-shelf and along-shelf transport in the area between Prince William Sound and Gore Point.  Moorings across line 8 would also be deployed from April to September, starting in 2001.

• Ned Cokelet, Anne Hollowed and Phyllis Stabeno also are submitting a proposal to GLOBEC to address the hypothesis that juvenile salmon use the Alaska Coastal Current (ACC) for their seaward migration.  The work would include sampling salmon and locating and measuring the ACC with vessel-mounted ADCP.  This would probably require installing an ADCP on the ship that the Ocean Carrying Capacity (OCC) program uses.  In addition, tidal currents would have to be modeled and subtracted from the ADCP observations.  Al Hermann suggested several available tidal models.

• Because GLOBEC opportunities address salmon and physical oceanography of the Gulf of Alaska, it is difficult for the Alaska Fisheries Science Center's RACE scientists, who study walleye pollock, to propose against GLOBEC.   RACE FOCI scientists are exploring cooperative work with OCC personnel to sample juvenile pollock and salmon during OCC cruises to the Gulf of Alaska and Bristol Bay.

• Bering Sea conditions -- Following dramatic sea ice buildup in December and January, the southeastern Bering Sea underwent just as dramatic an ice retreat during February.  Sea ice is well north of the Pribilof Islands now.  However, the water on the shelf remains very cold, less than 1.5° C, and fairly fresh.  It has a milky cast to it again, indicating the presence of coccolithophores and/or their liths.  Water samples have been sent for analysis.  It would be useful to know the spectral component of light that coccolithophores block out, as larval pollock apparently depend on part of the UV spectrum, as well as the visible spectrum, to find prey.

• MF00-01 Leg 1 -- Lisa Rugen was aboard the Miller Freeman from Seattle to Dutch Harbor.  She successfully collected 10-month-old pollock, approximately 50 pollock from each of three locations in the Shelikof sea valley.  Also, CTDs and bongo tows were completed across Unimak Pass.  During the cruise, Lisa worked on the new FOCI Cruise Operations Database (COD) that replaces the Discrete Sample Database (DSDB).

• MF00-01 Leg 2 -- Morgan Busby, Rachael Cartwright and Lisa Rugen participated in the second leg of MF00-01.  The Miller Freeman trawled at the head of Bering Canyon in order to collect eggs from spawning arrowtooth flounder.  Although arrowtooth flounder were collected, the fish were not spawning yet.  During leg 2, the remainder of the CTD work at Unimak Pass was completed.

 
• MF00-01 Leg 3 -- Carol DeWitt led this Bering Sea mooring cruise.  The Miller Freeman steamed to mooring site 2 where a subsurface mooring was deployed.  Sediment traps were recovered at sites 2 and 3, and both traps appear to have functioned normally.  The scientific party then completed a CTD survey from site 2 across the shelf break and into the basin at site 6.  The cruise concluded with CTDs along the easternmost line south of Amukta Pass and along the 4-station line across Unimak Pass.

• NOAA Ship Ron Brown schedule --  Due to increased fuel prices, two sea days have been eliminated from the fall cruise aboard the Ron Brown.

Al Hermann presented a progress report on the FOCI project to generate Shelikof Strait model-run libraries for recruitment hindcasting.  The project received its fast workstation (COMPAQ XP-1000) in November 1999.  The first task, begun in January by a part-time support scientist, was to recompile for this workstation the model code that has been run on the ARSC CRAY computer.  Some problems arose due to the different numerical precision of the CRAY and COMPAQ platforms.  Rather than struggle with recompilation/execution of programs used to create model input files (numerical grids and associated parameters), it was decided to circumvent these problems by converting binary input files from the CRAY directly into ASCII form for use as input on the COMPAQ platform. This is a straightforward process and, once completed, annual model runs will begin.

The next FOCI PI meeting will be at 10 a.m. on Thursday, 13 April 2000, in the AFSC Director's Conference Room (4/2143). Please submit to Allen Macklin, no later than the day before the meeting, agenda items and fax-ready copies of figures or handouts that you intend to present at the next meeting. Alternately, presentation materials may be posted on the WWW or e-mailed to remote participants before the meeting.

Mail corrections and addenda to the FOCI Coordinator.