33 U.S.C. § 3601: Purposes

to the public; to support national defense, search and rescue operations, marine commerce, navigation safety, weather, climate, and marine forecasting, energy siting and production, economic development, ecosystem-based marine, coastal, and Great Lakes resource management, public safety, and public outreach and education; to promote greater public awareness and stewardship of the Nation’s ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes resources and the general public welfare; to provide easy access to ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes data and promote data sharing between Federal and non-Federal sources and promote public data sharing; to enable advances in scientific understanding to support the sustainable use, conservation, management, and understanding of healthy ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes resources to ensure the Nation can respond to opportunities to enhance food, economic, and national security; and to monitor and model changes in the oceans and Great Lakes, including with respect to chemistry, harmful algal blooms, hypoxia, water levels, and other phenomena; to improve the Nation’s capability to measure, track, observe, understand, and predict events related directly and indirectly to weather and climate, natural climate variability, and interactions between the oceanic and atmospheric environments, including the Great Lakes; to sustain, upgrade, and modernize the Nation’s ocean and Great Lakes observing infrastructure to detect changes and ensure delivery of reliable and timely information; and to promote basic and applied research to develop, test, and deploy innovations and improvements in coastal and ocean observation technologies, including advanced observing technologies such as unmanned maritime systems needed to address critical data gaps, modeling systems, other scientific and technological capabilities to improve the understanding of weather and climate, ocean-atmosphere dynamics, global climate change, and the physical, chemical, and biological dynamics of the ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes environments; and to conserve healthy and restore degraded coastal ecosystems.