Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns of flash floods 15 minutes before they hit—
a life-or-death difference for someone hiking in a slot canyon, for instance. It’s a huge advance from 1977, when Mary Glackin joined the agency. Back then, “we had zero lead time,” she recalls. “Once it started, we’d tell you about it.”
Glackin, 56, NOAA’s deputy under secretary for operations, started her career in the agency’s National Weather Service, so she’s proud of the flood-warning progress. But NOAA’s newest early-warning challenge swamps the challenge of predicting flash floods. The agency is taking on the all-encompassing effects of changes in the earth’s climate.
Aspects of climate—such as future precipitation and temperatures; ocean currents, levels and acidification; and even melting rates for sea ice—affect multiple facets of life and business. For example, climate plays an important role when deciding power plant locations, setting home insulation standards, predicting crop yields and fishing hauls, plotting shipping routes and scheduling sporting events. So governments, businesses, nonprofits and universities are clamoring for climate data. While NOAA has addressed climate issues for years in different parts of its organization, the agency is now proposing to create a single climate service to integrate its approach.
Building the new service will require the largest realignment in the history of the $5.5 billion, 13,000-employee agency, but far from the only one, Glackin says. The agency continually adapts to the oceans and atmosphere it monitors. “I’ve seen a tremendous amount of change in 33 years,” she says. “One of the things that has driven it is our understanding of how the earth system works and how earth sciences work.”
NOAA’s fiscal 2012 budget request outlines the new Climate Service, pending congressional approval. It is to be cost neutral, bringing together capabilities now dispersed across existing organizations. Its budget would be $346 million with a staff of 610, and it would be comprised of people and funding from three line offices: the National Weather Service, Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research and the National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service.
NOAA looks forward to a day when, as the National Weather Service did with weather forecasting, the Climate Service will spawn a new private industry providing services and products based on climate data.
The Climate Service will play an important role in NOAA’s overall mission of rendering U.S. ecosystems, communities and economies more resilient in the face of change. “By providing critical planning information that our businesses and our communities need, the NOAA Climate Service will help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change,” said then-Commerce Secretary Gary Locke at the February 8, 2010 announcement of the new service.
If the reorganization goes well, it will be a major part of Glackin’s professional legacy. “It’s a nice time to be at NOAA because the science is exciting, and society’s demand for information is at an all-time high,” she says.
Connecting the Data
NOAA likes to combine knowledge and people in innovative, practical and sometimes surprising ways, Glackin points out. For example, management of the nation’s fisheries and marine sanctuaries, an important part of NOAA’s mission, has benefited from an overhaul of the National Weather Service and an expanded capacity for using more sophisticated satellites that came on line during Glackin’s tenure.
“When I came into the agency, there was very little connection between the people who were making weather forecasts for things like precipitation and the people who were managing fisheries,” Glackin says. “Today we know how a harmful algae bloom [that kills fish] develops and how it is influenced by precipitation patterns. Across NOAA, you have people working together collaboratively to provide innovative services that nobody really thought about 33 years ago.”
Glackin played a key role in modernizing the weather service to better connect forecasters with data and to enable its forecasts to be more broadly used. From 1993 to 1999 she directed the program building the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), a 10-year project at the core of the NWS modernization. AWIPS gave forecasters, for the first time, access to Doppler radar data, satellite imagery, automated weather observations and computer-generated forecasts from a single work station.
Even before the Climate Service goes into action, NOAA has been moving to better corral and present climate data. In February 2010, the agency unveiled a prototype Climate Services portal that will evolve into a go-to Web site for NOAA’s climate data, products, and services for all users. Initially, the site is focusing on displaying some of NOAA’s most popular data sets, along with an online magazine, video interviews with agency scientists, a climate statistics dashboard, a news feed, maps and other material.
NOAA “‘called on the breadth of its expertise,’” Glackin says—from seafood safety to air quality—to respond to the massive oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
Fascinated by Weather
At a young age, Glackin developed what she calls “an obvious fascination with weather. One of my earliest formative memories has to do with a hurricane that was not forecast,” she says of a 1962 event near Philadelphia. She remembers “being sent to school in the morning and released at noon time [because] first-graders shouldn’t be walking home from school” in a hurricane.
“Our mission is fabulous: saving lives and property, and really making sure these treasures of resources are able to be used today and into the future.”
—Mary Glackin, Deputy Under Secretary for Operations, NOAA
She came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when the earth sciences movement was in full swing, she says. The native Pennsylvanian “was raised like a lot of people of my generation—out the front door in the morning . . . raised in the environment.”
Her family has owned a home on Long Beach Island, N.J., for decades, “so I’ve always had a connection to the ocean,” Glackin says. She remembers a family beach trip that ended abruptly in the middle of the night, as her parents packed five kids in the car and fled just ahead of an encroaching storm that they hadn’t known about only hours earlier.
She graduated from the University of Maryland, in 1982, earning a degree in computer science with coursework in meteorology. “There is a very strong connection between computer science and meteorology,” she says. “Meteorologists own some of the biggest, fanciest [mathematical] equations that you need computers to solve. So I came to work for the National Weather Service.”
‘Science, Service, Stewardship’
When Glackin joined NOAA, the agency was less than a decade old. Created by the Nixon administration in 1970 as part of the Commerce Department, NOAA brought together three of the oldest federal agencies: the Coast and Geodetic Survey, formed in 1807; the Weather Bureau, formed in 1870; and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, formed in 1871.
Six line organizations create a range of products and services—including daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, climate monitoring, fisheries management, coastal restoration and the support of marine commerce—that affect one-third of the country’s gross domestic product.
“Science, service and stewardship underscore NOAA’s mission,” Glackin says. “All of these pieces interplay.”
Glackin has held top posts in three of NOAA’s six line offices. The National Weather Service, which Glackin headed as acting assistant administrator for several months in 2007 after running the AWIPS program, provides weather, hydrologic and climate forecasts and warnings to protect life and property and enhance the economy.
The National Environmental Satellite, Data and Information Service, where Glackin was deputy assistant administrator from 1999 to 2002, provides environmental data from satellites and other sources. Glackin also served a term at the Office of Program Planning and Integration as assistant administrator. The office oversees strategic planning, performance evaluation, program integration and policy integration.
“Today we know how harmful algae blooms develop and are influenced by precipitation patterns,” says Glackin.
The Advantage of Experience
Having witnessed and managed more than three decades of change, Glackin has the advantage of experience as NOAA moves to create a new service. Realigning NOAA’s climate functions, she says, parallels the overhaul of the National Weather Service in the 1980s and 1990s.
“There was on ongoing recognition that our warnings weren’t as good as they needed to be and a recognition that there was technology around that could help to solve that problem,” Glackin says. “Radar technology had gotten better, and we knew we could launch better satellites that would improve our tracking of storms. . . . But we knew, much like we do in climate today, that we didn’t have the right organizational structure to do it.
“We basically changed the whole technological base. We brought in new science and basically upgraded the skill set of our work force,” Glackin says.
NOAA has continued to refine its operations, largely by “making connections,” Glackin says. This was especially true in response to the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil-drilling rig in April 2010 and subsequent three-month massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill “required us to call on the breadth of NOAA’s expertise, and not only the obvious things like the safety of seafood,” says Glackin. “One of the interesting pieces for me has been how some of our air quality work has been contributing to the overall accounting for how much oil was ultimately leaked. It took all parts of NOAA to meet this challenge.”
The Deepwater Horizon spill, Glackin says, underscored how much remains unknown about marine ecosystems, including how much of the spilled oil was eaten by microbes and the continuing aftereffects of the spill. “We continue to assess the impact of the oil spill on that ecosystem,” Glackin says. “It’s still not over [as of March 2011]. We have two areas of the Gulf that are closed to fishing today.”
Change From Within
Glackin’s preferred management approach “is to try and do as much from the grass roots up, to really involve the workforce in helping to set and refine the vision for where we’re going,” she says. In fact, the initiative to create a Climate Service was driven by teams within NOAA “that looked at what the need was and what some of the options were,” she says.
Glackin ticks off the challenges of creating a Climate Service. First, there is the challenge of managing stakeholders’ expectations “because reorganization overnight won’t transform us and make things a whole step better the next day.”
Second, is change management. “At a global level people can buy into change, but when it comes down to their particular area, they don’t actually plan on changing themselves,” Glackin says. “We have some of those challenges.” NOAA must be careful to maintain the integrity of its science as it realigns itself, “ensuring that we do it in the most transparent way and that we are conveying confidence in our science,” she says.
But Glackin is optimistic that NOAA can once again adapt to the changing needs of Americans and the earth. “Having your workforce engaged and committed to goals are key,” she says. That’s not hard at NOAA, she adds. “Our mission is fabulous: saving lives and property, and really making sure these treasures of resources are able to be used today and into the future.”
John Pulley is a veteran journalist in the Washington, D.C., area and founder of The Pulley Group, an editorial services agency.
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