Congratulations to PMEL.

I'm so delighted in you reaching this big milestone of 50 years.

Congratulations PMEL on 50 years.

Many thanks go out today to all who served during my time and thereafter and all who are serving today.

Congratulations, PMEL, for a half century of outstanding ocean science and observations.

PMEL is one of the premier oceanographic research centers in the world.

It's been wonderful to see it grow over the years.

When I first went to PMEL in the late seventies, the facilities were a far cry from the way they are today.

We had offices in a motel.

We did our research in an abandoned aircraft hangar out at Sand Point on Lake Washington, and we made do.

But there was a sense of excitement in doing new things that could make a real difference to society that I think brought all the PMEL people together.

It made me feel that I really would enjoy and love working at NOAA.

In 1997 to 1998, there was a major El Niño.

We were all concerned about getting proper warnings out to Southern California and Western states about heavy increased rainfall and flooding, and PMEL provided the information that we needed coming from the tropical buoy array that they had established in the in the Pacific.

The development of the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean Buoy Array, or TAO Array, starting in 1985 and led by PMEL, was a key element in a new observing system for oceanic and atmospheric measurements that dramatically helped improve our understanding and prediction of the El Niño.

There was an opportunity to use the PMEL data to bring the vice president and others out to make the warnings and the PMEL group provided that basic information and, in fact, it was one of the more successful responses of a state, California, to the El Niño warnings.

It was the data from the TAO Array that really helped scientists understand, in three dimensions, what are the ocean and atmosphere dynamics that we call El Niño.

Very complex system and has global effects in weather patterns.

There are so many cool things that came out of that lab when I was there.

Particularly, what stood out in my mind was the work with the uncrewed systems, the Saildrone, the Gliders, and the Argo system.

I mean, coming from a data assimilation background, those observations are priceless and had a huge impact.

They were pioneers in developing the Slocum Glider; autonomous vehicles, small ones, that you can deploy easily, that can cruise the ocean on their own for days, weeks, months, making really valuable measurements of temperature and salinity in areas that we otherwise don't reach scientifically.

They were the first office I saw that was using uncrewed systems where they were integrating different sensor packages on the Saildrone uncrewed surface vessel as well as the Oculus uncrewed underwater glider.

The innovation in them inspired me to establish NOAA's new Uncrewed Systems Operations Center, as well as leading the development of a NOAA Uncrewed System Strategy and strategic plan.

And in 2021, one of NOAA PMEL’s Saildrones actually intercepted a category-four hurricane.

Data from within the storm at ocean level was tremendously valuable and an amazing get.

Things like the Arctic Report Card, a lot of the eDNA work that you do is amazing and I think has huge applications
all over the globe.

And then the DART system; we wouldn't have tsunami warnings if it wasn't for that.

One of the important things in terms of public service that PMEL has done is to have established a tsunami warning network, which is today all over the world, led by PMEL.

In 2011, the tsunami generated by the Tohoku earthquake off Japan was first detected by a DART buoy 25 minutes after the event.

That allowed NOAA to generate inundation forecasts for Hawaii and the Pacific coast a full six hours before the tsunami actually struck.

This is a great example of work that was done by PMEL that grew into a global monitoring system.

These data gathering buoys provide continual monitoring to alert the world to a major underwater event and provide early warning to coastal communities.

And the number of stations positioned around the Pacific Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Caribbean grew to 39 stations in 2008.

And congrats on that.

The DART array of seafloor observatories has been hugely valuable and expanding the warning times that shoreside populations have to get out of the way when a tsunami is coming.

Another side of PMEL is the work that they've done on ocean acidification.

The ocean gets more acid as the carbon content of the atmosphere increases.

And this has a big effect on fisheries in the Northwest Pacific, but also in the Arctic, where PMEL studies have shown us how the ocean acidification can affect the fisheries there and the Alaskan communities.

One of the things I thought was fascinating was the work of a number of scientists at PMEL in this program, Ecosystems & Fisheries-Oceanography Coordinated Investigations, or EcoFOCI, specifically in the Gulf of Alaska, Bering Sea, Aleutian Islands, and just recently the Chukchi Sea.

So important because the fish stocks up there are the largest by volume and some of the largest by economic impact in the country.

So the science has never been more important for the lives and livelihoods of the fishing communities in that region and really the economic prosperity of our nation.

So I have to call that work out as being something really notable in terms of public benefit.

Congratulations, PMEL, on 50 years.

It was an honor and privilege to work for such dedicated scientists.

Thank you so much for your service and keep up the amazing work.

Please continue in meeting the needs of the future, which I believe will be many.

Thank you very much, and please keep up the good work.

Congratulations, PMEL.

Thank you for all the important research you do that just not only benefits the public, but improves the health of our planet.

So congratulations to the PMEL team for 50 years of truly outstanding foundational ocean science observations.

Congratulations, PMEL.

And here's to another 50 years of groundbreaking research.