Five NOAA ships supporting Alaska projects

Five NOAA ships are operating off Alaska, supporting a variety of projects. While NOAA ships Fairweather and Rainier continue to collect data to improve nautical charts in the Arctic, NOAA ships Ronald H. Brown and Oscar Dyson are both supporting a NOAA Fisheries-NOAA Research joint project, EcoFOCI, to study marine ecosystems in the Northern Bering Sea, Chukchi Sea, Beaufort Sea, and Gulf of Alaska. NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker is carrying a team of NOAA Fisheries scientists on a month-long research survey off of Kodiak Island to try to locate the rare North Pacific right whale.