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Part III. Appendix 4: User OutreachMalcolm,>> I’d suggest that you contact FEMA (HAZUS program), which seems to focus on the areas interested.A good contact is Claire Drury at FEMA in Washington (202-646-2884).c-s Wu**************************************************************************************From: “David McGehee” To: “Malcolm L. Spaulding” Subject: Re: Coastal_List: User Input on ISOOSDate: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 10:44:25 -0500X-MSMail-Priority: NormalX-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4522.1200X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4522.1200Dear Malcolm:I’m afraid I’m going to ignore your specific request and bring up asingle issue that I feel strongly about, and I which I believe should be ofoverriding interest - standards for ocean data, most especially wave data.The free exchange and wide utilization of wave data is severely hampered bythe babble of formats, definitions, and methods of computation in use by thevarious agencies and organizations that collect and/or distribute wave data.I managed the US Army Corps of Engineers Field Wave Gaging Program for 12years, which funded the operation of more wave observation stations thanany other program (yes, including NDBC).One of my most vexing problems was simply intercomparing data from twostations operated by two different organizations, or even the sameorganization using different instruments. In most cases, it required severalhours of a technicians time to simply lay the two data sets on the sameplot. Validating model output with data taken within its domain was evenmore trying. If you make any attempts to integrate the available waveobservations into a single distribution system, you’ll soon run into thesame problem. While the average scientist familiar with writing code ortools such as Matlab may not find this a difficult problem, it is arecurring one, and a major impediment to the utilization of wave data bymanagers and the general public.258