Shipping industry, boaters fear risks of cuts to federal Great Lakes programs

By Carol Thompson, The Detroit News

Whitefish Point at the Upper Peninsula’s northeastern tip is a notoriously challenging area for ship captains navigating Lake Superior.

It’s where they decide whether conditions are a “go” or “no go” for safe entrance into the open lake, said Hayden Henderson, a senior research engineer at Michigan Technological University’s Great Lakes Research Center.

That’s why Michigan Tech placed a buoy there to track wave height, a metric that captains and weather forecasters use to determine whether to cross the inland sea. Henderson consulted with the Lake Carriers Association, the trade group representing American Great Lakes commercial shipping companies, to decide where the buoy should go.

Federal dollars made it happen. The buoy was funded by federal money funneled through a nonprofit that maps real-time Great Lakes weather and water conditions.

“It’s kind of full circle,” Henderson said. “They fund me to deploy (the buoy) and maintain it to provide the data. They host the data, and commercial shippers make use of it.”

The federal funding that pays for much of the Great Lakes water, weather and ice cover monitoring is at risk in the Trump administration’s proposed National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration budget for 2026. The agency’s budget request calls for ending some of the programs that ship captains and other boaters rely on, while the Senate has proposed keeping the funding largely in place.

Meanwhile, people who work in data collection and commercial shipping grapple with the uncertainty and said sweeping budget and staffing cuts could inadvertently put ship captains and other boaters at risk.

On the chopping block at NOAA is an Ann Arbor lab where scientists research and model ice cover, an important issue for ship captains trying to move cargo during the winter, as well as a nonprofit that displays real-time water and weather data collected by buoys throughout the Great Lakes.

“Without the data, it’s sort of like squinting one eye and hoping you’re doing a good job of navigating,” said Shelby Brunner, science and observations manager for the nonprofit, the Great Lakes Observing System. “You’re missing key points that you’ve become reliant on in a lot of ways.”

NOAA declined to grant interviews about the agency’s budget request or its Great Lakes programs.

“Per long-standing practice, NOAA does not discuss matters relating to the budget or internal management issues,” Director of Public Affairs for NOAA Research Monica Allen said in an email. “NOAA remains dedicated to its mission, providing timely information, research, and resources that serve the American public and ensure our nation’s environmental and economic resilience.”

Buoy network supports forecasters, captains
NOAA’s budget justification calls for cuts that would shrink the agency by over a quarter from roughly $6.3 billion to just over $4.5 billion. In the budget document submitted to Congress, agency officials said the goal is to create a “leaner NOAA” that prioritizes the economy, innovation in space and weather forecasting and the maritime shipping industry but terminates climate programs.

The Senate Appropriation Committee’s proposed spending plan is more generous. It calls for a much smaller reduction in NOAA spending, down to $6.1 billion, said Alex Eastman, Great Lakes program manager for the Northeast-Midwest Institute, an advocacy group for the regions.

The Republican-led Senate committee called for continuing the spending for the program that funds the Great Lakes buoy network and the Ann Arbor NOAA lab, which conducts research on ice cover, harmful algae blooms and other issues. The committee also voiced concern over staffing losses that could affect NOAA’s ability to forecast weather and protect public safety.

In its budget justification that includes widespread cuts to many programs, NOAA leaders committed to continuing two programs used by commercial ship captains, the National Water Level Observation Network and the Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System.

But among the agency’s requested cuts is the entire budget for its Integrated Ocean Observing System Regional Associations, including the one in the Great Lakes, the Great Lakes Observing System.

That system, known as GLOS, collects data on wave height, wave intervals, air pressure, water temperature and other metrics from buoys throughout the lakes. The buoys are owned by many different organizations, such as NOAA, universities and private companies.

GLOS releases the buoy data on a free online map known as Seagull.

There are about 200 buoys or other data collection stations in the GLOS network, Brunner said. Only about half of those are owned by the federal government.

That means GLOS effectively doubles the data collection stations that National Weather Service meteorologists use to create Great Lakes forecasts, she said. Sailors, charter captains, commercial ship captains and others also use the Seagull map, she said.

“The only data that gets into the Weather Service without GLOS are things that have a federal footprint,” Brunner said. “The Weather Service knows they can come to Seagull and find this missing information and use it to paint a fuller picture of what’s happening.”

GLOS is a nonprofit funded almost exclusively by NOAA, although Brunner said the nonprofit’s leaders are trying to diversify the program’s financing sources. She is optimistic about the program’s continuation because it is popular with anglers, charter fishing captains, boaters, commercial ship captains, drinking water managers and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

But she acknowledged its future is uncertain.

“I think there’s an unprecedented level of not knowing what it could look like,” Brunner said. “There’s a chance NOAA gets reorganized, and we maybe fall under a different program or we get combined with other programs. … We just don’t know.”

Losing NOAA funding would mean the buoy network disappears, said Michigan Tech’s Henderson, who manages 19 buoys that feed data into GLOS.

Although it’s not as vital as NOAA’s National Water Level Observation Network and Physical Oceanographic Real-Time System tools, commercial ship captains use GLOS’ Seagull map as they voyage across the Great Lakes, said Eric Peace, Lake Carriers Association director of operations and communications. Mariners are “data hounds,” Peace said.

That’s particularly important on the Great Lakes, where dangerous weather can erupt quickly compared with oceans, he said.

“I’m a retired Coast Guard, and I served in Alaska,” Peace said. “I can tell you I would take 30-foot seas in Alaska over 10-foot seas on Lake Superior.”

That’s because ocean swells are driven by tides and gravity, Henderson said. Those forces are more predictable than the winds that drive the Great Lakes’ waves.

“There’s a much closer tie between real-time data and the potential hazard, like a wave measurement, because it’s not as easily predicted,” Henderson said. “We know how the Earth is spinning. We can predict tides and swells to most degrees, but the wind is much more stochastic.”

Ice forecasting hangs in balance

If the agency leaders get the lean budget they seek, another major NOAA program on the chopping block is the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, an Ann Arbor lab that conducts a wide array of Great Lakes research on invasive species, weather forecasting, climate change, harmful algae blooms and more.

Scientists stationed there research the Great Lakes’ ice cover as well as disseminate ice cover maps generated by Canadian and U.S. ice programs. NOAA declined to make one of the lab’s data scientists available for an interview.

Ice is an important challenge to Great Lakes shipping, the Lake Carriers Association’s Peace said. It slows down commercial ships and can damage them. Understanding Great Lakes ice is not simple, he said, since it varies in thickness and can move in large sheets.

“We’ve had vessels sliced open before if plates move, ice sheets move, and there’s no Coast Guard icebreakers out there,” Peace said.

The Great Lakes Observing System recently embarked on a new project to provide forecasters with information about ice thickness, Brunner said. Satellites can track the area covered with ice, but they aren’t good at measuring ice thickness, which means captains can’t be sure whether their ships are strong enough to bust through or whether they need the Coast Guard to go first.

Brunner has been working with ice fishers to encourage them to report the thickness of ice when they auger through. GLOS could send those reports to meteorologists who could use them to develop better ice thickness models.

Michigan Tech’s Henderson argued the Great Lakes need more spending, not less.

“That level of funding is probably still inadequate to keep up with the rate of change in the Great Lakes,” he said. “We’re growing, we’re building more things. If we want to rebuild industry, reindustrialize the Great Lakes, it’s going to require careful monitoring to make sure we can support that without damaging drinking water resources for millions of people.”