Judd Gregg: “Hopefully it will not hit New Hampshire. Because of NOAA, we can predict where a hurricane will go with a great deal…”

“Hopefully it will not hit New Hampshire. Because of NOAA, we can predict where a hurricane will go with a great deal more accuracy. Certainly, States such as South Carolina and those that are located along the hurricane trough have taken full advantage of it. This agency goes way beyond the issues of atmospherics. It goes into quality of water, ocean activity, marine fisheries, and we have made a huge commitment in this area in this bill. Environmental conservation is extraordinarily important as part of the NOAA initiative in this bill, and, as the chairman was reciting, we have put a large amount of dollars into it, especially in the Coastal Zone Management Program and the National Estuarine Research Reserve. The committee recognizes that 90 percent of the commerce in this country enters through our ports, and our nautical charts are grossly outdated. This year we address this problem by aggressively increasing funding for mapping and charting, electronic navigational charts, shoreline mapping, the survey backlog, and securing additional hydrographic ships. Because of the critical importance of fishing to our economy and our cultural history, the committee is funding a new $54 million fishery research vessel, as was mentioned by the chairman --this is absolutely critical--along with making a significant effort to protect and preserve the right whale population which is very important to my part of the country.”