UPDATE: The FOFC Fleet Renewal Plan has been revised and accepted by FOFC and NORLC.
The report has been sent to the printers, and you can view an acrobat version of this report
at: http://www.geo-prose.com/projects/fleet_rpt_1.html

June 8, 2001

To the UNOLS Community:

Earlier this year, in response to a request from the Federal Oceanographic Facilities Committee (FOFC), UNOLS sounded the community for its reactions to a FOFC draft discussion paper that presented an interagency view of the numbers and kinds of ships needed to renew the academic fleet over the coming two decades. Community responses were both numerous and thoughtful.

The UNOLS Council and Fleet Improvement Committee have worked to integrate these responses with their own expertise and thereby to create a coherent review of the FOFC document. That review is now available for reading on the UNOLS Website at: http://www.unols.org/committees/fic/fltdisc/unols_fofc_final.pdf

It has already been presented to FOFC on April 27, and a letter of acknowledgment from Dr. Margaret Leinen, FOFC Chair, is included in the Web posting. We encourage you and any others interested in this important subject to read the new posting and to continue your engagement with the matter over the long haul that will be required to plan, fund and execute a sound, science-driven renewal of the fleet. In order that you may correlate the UNOLS review document with the raw community responses to the FOFC draft, the raw responses and original FOFC document also remain on the Web at: FOFC Draft Plan: http://www.unols.org/committees/fic/fltdisc

Survey Responses from the UNOLS Community: http://www.unols.org/committees/fic/fltdisc/responses.html

Sincerely,

Robert A. Knox, UNOLS Chair