The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month redeployed an important weather buoy about 70 miles into the Pacific Ocean from the mouth of the Columbia River.
The giant buoy is one of the most important parts of a data collection system that informs regional forecasts and helps determine if it’s safe for ships to enter and exit the Columbia River, a multibillion-dollar cornerstone of the region’s economy and broader U.S. supply chains.
“This particular buoy (46089) went adrift back in December of 2023,” said Craig Kohler of NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center. The center, which is part of the National Weather Service, runs a fleet of nearly 200 buoys in the oceans surrounding the U.S., including 104 weather buoys.
These buoys each cost roughly $300,000, weigh 2,000 pounds and measure 10 feet wide by 30 feet tall. They are anchored to the sea floor, sometimes more than a mile below the surface.
When a buoy stops working or disappears — both of which are relatively common occurrences — it’s Kohler’s job to coordinate the logistical wonder of getting the station running again.
Missing buoys
The disappearance of No. 46089 compounded the earlier loss of No. 46029, which is the closest of three NOAA weather buoys used to predict weather at the Columbia’s mouth.
No. 46089, the middle of the trio, provides data about ocean conditions about three hours before they reach the coast, said Colby Neuman of the National Weather Service office in Portland.
For meteorologists like him, the concurrent loss of the two buoys meant less data on which to base forecasts.
“There have been some very big advances in satellite technology, (and) airplanes carry weather sensors on them, but there still is a relatively large void of data out over the ocean,” he said. “That’s where these buoys help with giving us some data points over the ocean. It’s not a lot, because they’re few and far between, but it’s still better than nothing.”
And while you might not have noticed a change in weather forecasts’ accuracy while the buoys were down, people who regularly navigate the mouth of the river — nicknamed the Graveyard of the Pacific — did notice the absence.
“Both the two closest ones to the Columbia River failed last year, so we went all of last winter without them,” Capt. Dan Jordan said.
He’s the administrative pilot for the Columbia River Bar Pilots, a role that combines administrative duties with guiding ships in and out of the river.
That lack of weather information during the most dangerous time to navigate one of the most dangerous waterways on Earth meant the famed 178-year-old organization frequently had to suspend its service of guiding ships across the Columbia River Bar.
And those pauses interrupted the flow of the roughly $31 billion of goods that pass through the river’s deep water channel alone each year. At least 40,000 jobs depend on that, according to the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association.
The loss also hurt smaller river users, too, putting crabbers in sometimes life-threatening situations, The Daily Astorian in Oregon reported in March.
Maintenance vs. repair
Unsurprisingly, those high stakes for weather forecasts, regional economies and mariners’ basic safety quickly translate to pressure on NOAA to fix the buoys.
“We were getting a lot of pressure from the congressional staff from Oregon and Washington,” Kohler said. “We get calls probably every couple of weeks.”
In January, roughly two months respectively after the buoys stopped transmitting data, U.S. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, D-Skamania, wrote to NOAA, urging redeployment.
But, like many scientific agencies providing the mostly invisible but utterly essential services that make all of our lives and our economies possible, NOAA simply does not have the money to do everything its leaders feel it should.
That leaves Kohler and his colleagues to balance a calculus of economic impact, political power and public good — all tempered by reality coming in the form of a shrinking budget — and make a defensible choice.
“The (National Data Buoy Center’s) budget is pretty small in comparison to all that work we have to do,” Kohler said. “So we have to do it as efficiently as we can.”
After more than half a century of trial and error, the center has developed an efficiency-based method focused on scheduled maintenance conducted at intervals instead of immediate response to every outage.
“We plan ahead of time. We get the best deals we can, we buy in bulk for equipment, we negotiate over vessel costs,” Kohler explained. “If we did individual cruises, it would cost us a fortune.”
That means crucial stations like the trio that inform Columbia River Bar Pilots often go months without operational buoys.
But in June, about six months after it first stopped transmitting data, the closest buoy was redeployed. And, on Nov. 15, buoy No. 46089 was redeployed as a part of a larger mission.
The calls and the work, however, don’t stop.
“We’ve already pretty much finished our plans for next year,” Kohler said. “That’s how far we have to start in advance to make sure we have everything that we need in place.”
And with buoy No. 46005 — the farthest out of the crucial trio of buoys — down as of Nov. 19, the buoy center already has another item on its to-do list.
