Rick Cole, President, RDSEA International, Inc.: Rick has sailed on everything from aircraft carriers to kayaks and has been making in-situ physical oceanographic measurements in the world’s oceans, seas, bays and estuaries since his career began in 1978 at Florida Institute of Technology. With his sights set on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) after college, Rick spent the majority of the 1980s hydrographic surveying in the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska and with the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in Seattle, WA where he was involved in the initial installation of what is now called the TAO/TRITON Array (Tropical Atmosphere Ocean) along the equatorial region of the Pacific. Rick has been actively involved in most major physical oceanographic programs in the tropical Pacific Ocean over the past few decades funded by NOAA and the National Science Foundation (NSF): The Equatorial Pacific Ocean Climate Study (EPOCS), the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere Project (TOGA), the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere-Coupled Ocean Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE), the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) Program and the Pan-American Climate Study (PACS).
As a co-founding member of the University of South Florida’s (USF) Ocean Circulation Group (OCG) in 1989, Rick’s work expanded on oceanographic programs spanning the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea with a focus on ADCP deployments and the technical aspects of ocean circulation and ocean-atmosphere interaction. In 1993, alongside of blue-water programs in the Pacific, USF’s OCG began making measurements locally along the Gulf of Mexico's west Florida shelf (WFS, covers the eastern Gulf from the Mississippi Delta in the north to the Dry Tortugas in the south). From the near-shore environment out to the shelf break, many surface and subsurface moorings and buoys have formed an environmental snapshot of one of Earth’s most dynamic continental shelves. This offshore program continues today, after nearly a twenty-year evolution under the direction of the OCG and is a large component of the State of Florida’s “Coastal Ocean Monitoring and Prediction System” (COMPS - SECOORA - U.S. IOOS).
Rick is also a senior scientific and working diver with NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the American Academy of Underwater Sciences (AAUS), he Co-Chairs’ the Marine Technology Society’s (MTS) “Buoy Technology Committee” and the Office of Naval Research (ONR)/MTS bi-annual Buoy Workshop. He is an active member of the Data Buoy Cooperation Panel (DBCP) and the Tropical Moored Buoy Implementation Panel (TIP) a component of the Global Tropical Moored Buoy Array. RDSEA has recently joined the “Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Monsoon Analysis and Prediction” (RAMA) team, a new moored array sub-component of the Indian Ocean Observing System (IndOOS) providing measurements to enhance monsoon research and forecasting. Having recently retired from the University of South Florida Rick is now fully focused on RDSEA, the result of over thirty years of experience on oceanographic programs, some mentioned above, at the local, national and international level. Please click "
Curriculum Vitae" for a full career background review and portfolio.
