NOPP Projects, separated by Fiscal Year:
Fiscal Year 2012 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Improving Attachments of Remotely-deployed Dorsal Fin-mounted Tags: Tissue Structure, Hydrodynamics, In-situ Performance, and Tagged-animal Follow-up We recently developed small satellite-linked telemetry tags that are anchored with small attachment darts to the dorsal fins of small- and medium-sized cetaceans. These Low Impact Minimally-Percutaneous External-electronics Transmitter (LIMPET) tags have opened up the potential to monitor the movements of numerous species not previously accessible because they were too large or difficult to capture safely, but too small for tags that implant deeply within the body. One goal of this project is to improve upon our existing tagging methodology to achieve longer, less variable attachment durations by carefully examining the factors that affect attachment success. Our key goal is to develop a method for attaching tags to cetaceans that provides the data needed to answer critical conservation and management questions without an adverse effect on the tagged animal. Therefore, we will also conduct follow-up studies of whales that have been tagged with a remotely-deployed dorsal finmounted tag to accurately quantify wound healing and the effects of tagging on whale survival, reproduction, and behavior. The combination of these approaches will provide an improved understanding of some of the key factors affecting tag attachment duration as well as a more complete understanding of impacts to individuals due to tagging. | |
| Wave Dissipation and Balance - NOPP Wave Project Wind-generated waves play a prominent role at the interfaces of the ocean with the atmosphere, land and solid Earth. Waves also define in many ways the appearance of the ocean seen by remote-sensing instruments. Beyond these geophysical aspects, waves also affect human activities at sea and on the coast. The long-term goals of this research are to obtain a better understanding of the physical processes that affect ocean surface waves and their interactions with ocean currents and turbulence, seismic waves, sediments and remote sensing systems, and to improve our forecasting and hindcasting capacity of these phenomena from the global ocean to the nearshore scale. | |
| Observation-Based Dissipation and Input Terms for Spectral Wave Models, with End-User Testing The long-term goal is to implement input and dissipation source functions, based on advanced understanding of physics of air-sea interactions, wave breaking and swell attenuation, in waveforecast models. | |
| Refined Source Terms in WAVEWATCH III with Wave Breaking and Sea Spray Forecasts Several U.S. Federal Agencies operate wind wave prediction models for a variety of mission specific purposes. Much of the basic science contained in the physics core of these models is over a decade old, and incorporating recent research advances over the last decade will significantly upgrade the model physics. A major goal is to produce a refined set of source and sink terms for the wind input, dissipation and breaking, nonlinear wave-wave interaction, bottom friction, wave-mud interaction, wave-current interaction as well as sea spray flux. These should perform demonstrably better across a range of environments and conditions than existing packages and include a seamless transition from deep to shallow water outside the surf zone. After careful testing within a comprehensive suite of test bed cases, these refined source terms will be incorporated into the prediction systems operated by these agencies and by the broader wave modelling community. | |
| Deepwater Program: Exploration and Research of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Natural and Artificial Hard Bottom Habitats with Emphasis on Coral Communities: Reefs, Rigs and Wrecks A primary goal of this study is to obtain a robust predictive capability for the occurrence of rich cnidarian (primarily scleractinian coral) hard ground communities in the deep Gulf of Mexico (GoM). To achieve this long-term goal, this study will accomplish three interrelated and interdependent objectives. | |
| Examination of Health Effects and Long-term Impacts of Deployments of Multiple Tag Types on Blue, Humpback, and Gray Whales in the Eastern North Pacific Despite extensive use of implant tags for more than 30 years, only limited studies have been conducted of the health effects and long-term consequences of tag deployments on whales. This field is rapidly expanding including increased use of deep penetration tags on many populations including critically endangered populations such as the North Pacific right whale and the western gray whale. Studies of North Atlantic rights whales revealed a wide variety of conditions of the tag site after deployments of penetration tags varying from very minor divots to more extensive swellings. Our goal is to provide new insights into the long term consequences of different types of tags on several additional species of large whales including blue, humpback, and gray whales by conducting long term follow up of previously tagged individuals in the eastern North Pacific. We examine the long term impacts on health, reproduction, and mortality unitizing the past deployments of implant and suction cup tags on blue, humpback, and gray whales in the eastern North Pacific and our extensive monitoring of these populations. | |
| Next Generation of Advanced Laser Fluorescence Technology for Characterization of Natural Aquatic Environments The project research addresses our long-term goal to develop an analytical suite of the Advanced Laser Fluorescence (ALF) methods and instruments to improve our capacity for characterization of aquatic environments. The ALF technique (Chekalyuk and Hafez, 2008) uniquely combines spectrally and temporally resolved measurements of the laser-stimulated emission (LSE) to provide assessments of key variables, including chlorophyll a (Chl a), chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM), and phycobiliprotein-containing phytoplankton and cyanobacteria. The pump-during-probe measurements of variable fluorescence, Fv/Fm, yield assessments of phytoplankton photophysiological status. An extensive series of ALF measurments in diverse water types has demonstrated ALF utility as an integrated tool for aquatic research and observations. The ALF integration into the major oceanographic programs is currently in progress, including the California Current Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research (CCE LTER, NSF) and California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI, NOAA). | |
| A Unified Air-Sea Interface for Fully-Coupled Atmosphere-Wave-Ocean Models for Improving Intensity Prediction of Tropical Cyclones The goals of this PI team are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and its impact on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs), and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface that is flexible for use in a multi-model system and portable for transition to the next generation research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-land models. | |
| Impacts of Turbulence on Hurricane Intensity Our recent studies have shown that hurricane boundary layer turbulence, which must be parameterized in the current-generation weather-prediction models, plays a significant role in controlling the hurricane intensity. We find that horizontal turbulence, particularly in the radial direction (i.e., towards or away from the hurricane center), plays an important role in regulating hurricane intensity. The longterm goal of this project is thus to improve the hurricane intensity forecast by developing a more physically based horizontal turbulence parameterization scheme for hurricanes. | |
| Portable and Persistent Autonomous Real-Time Marine Mammal Acoustic Monitoring Current marine mammal monitoring (MMM) methods that use archival recorders or towed hydrophone arrays have the disadvantages of being analyzed long after the acoustic events of interest, or being subject to the noise of the ship towing the array and require dedicated on-ship computers and human reviewers to acquire and process the data, respectively. To overcome these disadvantages, this joint work involving the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) and SAIC, Inc. will integrate archival recorder electronics and a broad and satellite communications system with on-board detection, classification, and localization (DCL) software onto a Wave-Powered Glider Persistent Autonomous Vehicle ("WaveGlider" from Liquid Robotics, Inc.), to develop a mobile marine mammal monitor (hereafter �M4�) capable of transmitting DCL data in near real-time to an on-ship or on-shore Data Management and Communications (DMAC) receiver. | |
| An Ocean Observing System for Large-Scale Monitoring and Mapping of Noise Throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary The project goals were to map the low-frequency (<1000 Hz) ocean noise budget throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) ecosystem, identify and quantify the contributing sources of anthropogenic sounds within that ecosystem, and determine whether or not such noises have the potential to impact endangered marine mammals and fishes that use the Sanctuary. | |
| Visual Impact Evaluation System for Offshore Renewable Energy (VIESORE) VIESORE is an analytical and visualization tool for offshore renewable energy facilities, to be used by Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) staff to conduct National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) consultation when assessing impacts on the human environment and examining alternatives for in-house and public outreach � systematically and transparently. In 2009, the United States Department of Interior (DOI) completed its Final Renewable Energy Framework. This rule established a program for granting leases, easements, and rights-of-way (ROW) for the development of renewable energy. Renewable energy projects encouraged as part of this final rule include offshore wind facilities, along with wave and ocean current facilities. As a response to the increasing interest in the use of waters of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) for offshore renewable energy, the DOI�s BOEM has sought ways to ensure that proposed projects meet all applicable environmental laws and regulations, in hopes of streamlining the development of these facilities. As part of this effort, BOEM is sponsoring the development of an in-house computer-based system to evaluate potential visual impacts resulting from the construction and operation of offshore renewable energy facilities. The system is referred to as the Visual Impact Evaluation System for Offshore Renewable Energy (VIESORE). VIESORE is a geographic information system-based (GIS-based) software tool for creating spatially accurate and realistic visualizations of offshore renewable energy facilities, including offshore wind, wave, and ocean current facilities. | |
| DCL System Research Using Advanced Approaches for Land-based or Ship-based Real-time Recognition and Localization of Marine Mammals | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea-Surface Temperature (MISST) for IOOS Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is vital to coastal and marine spatial planning, global weather prediction, climate change studies, search and rescue, and ecosystem based management. SST is derived from measurements taken by numerous satellites carrying infrared and microwave radiometers, and measured from moored buoys, drifting buoys, and ships. This project focuses on completing research to improve the quality of the satellite SSTs from existing and new sensors, produce multi-sensor blended gap-free SSTs from US and international datasets, and successfully broaden the use of these products within specifically targeting coastal applications and the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). | |
| Advanced Coupled Atmosphere-wave-ocean Modeling for Improving Tropical Cyclone Prediction Models The goals of this PI team are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and their impacts on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs) and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface for use in a multi-model system that can transition to the next generation of research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-land models. | |
| Expansion of Metadata Management, Visualization and Data Processing Functionality of OBIS-SEAMAP for Passive Acoustic Monitoring Data In the light of increasing usage of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data, expanding research on PAM data collection and mounting demands to incorporating PAM data into habitat modeling and marine spatial planning, this project aims to enhance the standards and accessibility of PAM data to develop novel tools for advanced spatio-temporal analyses and visualization and to improve interoperability of PAM data among institutions hosting PAM data. | |
| Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA): Coordinated Monitoring, Prediction and Assessment to Support Decision-Makers Needs for Coastal and Ocean Data and Tools The long-term goal of this project is to integrate and augment existing observational, modeling, data management and education assets in the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA) domain to create an end-to-end Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System (RCOOS) in support of user-defined needs for improved coastal and ocean decision making. | |
| Evaluating Acoustic Technologies to Monitor Aquatic Organisms at Renewable Energy Sites The long-term goal of this program is to quantify and evaluate the ability of three active acoustic technologies (echosounder, multibeam sonar, and acoustic camera) to characterize and monitor animal densities and distributions at a proposed hydrokinetic site. Data from stationary, bottom-mounted acoustic packages will be compared to that from a mobile, surface survey. Results from this study will inform the choice, deployment, and data analyses of acoustic instrumentation use at marine hydrokinetic (MHK) sites. | |
| Modeling Wind Wave Evolution from Deep to Shallow Water Ocean waves are an important aspect of upper ocean dynamics, in particular on the shallow continental shelves and in coastal areas. The long-term objective of this work is to advance modeling capability in such coastal areas by improving model representations of effects associated with nonlinearity, inhomogeneity, and dissipation. | |
| Continued Development of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System The overarching goal of this project is to build a robust, user-driven, sustained, operational Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS). The specific goals of this project are to maintain the existing GCOOS capabilities and, as funding allows, to augment the existing observations to fill gaps and provide enhanced products and services. GCOOS capabilities include components to integrate data sets from diverse providers; assure consistency, quality, and accuracy of the data; create new products needed by users; and provide in a timely and efficient manner the data, products, and services needed by decision-makers, diverse stakeholders, and the public. Physical, meteorological,biogeochemical, and bathymetrical data are major components of the data system. | |
| Development of an Integrated ISFET pH Sensor for High Pressure Applications in the Deep-sea The long-term goals of this project are to enable observations of pH in the ocean using sensors deployed on autonomous platforms. These systems will enable robust, basin-scale observations of changing pH driven by natural and anthropogenic processes. | |
| Nonlinear and Dissipation Characteristics of Ocean Surface Waves in Estuarine Environments The overall goal of this work is the development of computational modules for the dissipation of surface wave energy due to expanses of bottom mud and marshland vegetation. The computational modules would represent both the dissipative effects on the surface waves and the effects of dissipation on other processes of wave transformation and evolution, with particular attention paid to the nonlinear energy exchange among wave frequencies. In addition these modules would allow for feedback between the surface wave and the energy dissipating feature. | |
| Protocols for Baseline Studies and Monitoring for Ocean Renewable Energy The long-term goal of this project is the development and broad application of a Protocol Framework for identifying, collecting and comparing environmental data relevant to offshore renewable energy projects. The Protocol Framework will outline the process for defining priority environmental interactions and the associated baseline and operational monitoring study protocols for wave, tidal, and offshore wind projects on the U.S. West Coast (California Current large marine ecosystem [LME]). | |
| Alaska Regional Coastal and Ocean Observing System The long-term goals of this project represent the priorities identified by stakeholder workshops and adopted by the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS) Board: 1) Increase access to existing coastal and ocean data; 2) Package information and data in useful ways to meet the needs of stakeholders; and 3) Increase observing and forecasting capacity in all regions of the state, with a priority on the Arctic and the northern Gulf of Alaska. | |
| Developing Environmental Protocols and Modeling Tools to Support Ocean Renewable Energy and Stewardship The long term goals of this project are to develop and test standardized protocols for baseline studies and monitoring for the collection and comparison of scientifically valid and comparable data for specific offshore renewable energy issues that seamlessly integrate with a newly designed conceptual framework and approach for cumulative environmental impact evaluation of offshore renewable energy development. | |
| Roadmap: Technologies for Cost Effective, Spatial Resource Assessments for Offshore Renewable Energy It has been estimated that the renewable energy in the oceans (offshore wind, waves and tides) could provide all of the world�s demand for electricity, but many challenges must be met prior to realizing even a small fraction of that potential. One of the challenges is the ability to sense the resources and their surrounding environments. Today the standard is to place a fixed structure in the ocean or to have people periodically visit a location to do assessments. This is unacceptable for two reasons: 1) Cost � The costs of a ocean meteorological (Met) tower is in the range $2-4 million. Site surveys are less expensive, but they are manpower intensive, and it is difficult to acquire simultaneous observations. 2) Spatial Information � There is a need to measure environmental parameters from the seafloor through the top of the marine atmospheric surface boundary layer, and over areas of hundreds of square miles. Current techniques, for example using anemometers, current meters and wave buoys, provide information only at discrete points, and understanding spatial correlations requires careful inter-calibration and maintenance of separate sensors. This is difficult enough on land, where there is generally easy access to the instruments, but is unrealistic at sea. By contrast, remote sensing technologies can provide continuous observations over extended spatial regions (in either the horizontal or vertical). Such information can be applies by developers and operators of wind and MHK power conversion devices for a wide range of tasks from local control and response optimization to predicting short-term fluctuations in winds, waves and currents, to long-term resource assessment. The New England Marine Renewable Energy Center (MREC) is funded under National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) solicitation, M10PS00152 to develop a roadmap for cost effective, spatial resource assessments for offshore renewable energy development. | |
| Data Assimilation and Predictability Studies for Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts This project aims to understand and improve the forecast of Tropical Cyclone (TC) lifecycle evolution and intensity, focusing on both large-scale environment and mesoscale phenomena in the TC system, which are major components responsible for intensity change. Two major challenges in TC intensity forecasting are the general lack of observations in the vicinity of TCs and the adaptive representation of the forecast error covariance. This project attempts to address both challenges for improving TC intensity forecasting. | |
| Improving Attachments of Non-Invasive (Type III) Electronic Data Loggers to Cetaceans The overall goal of this project is to increase the longevity of suction cup attachments for short term archival tags such as the DTAG. Specifically, we are working to extend the routine attachment duration for suction cup tags to multiple days, if not weeks. Methods will be developed to extend tag attachment by streamlining tag housings, selecting appropriate materials for tag/cup assembly, improving suction cup design, understanding the behavior of the attachment surface during attachment, and investigating the possible use of adhesives. | |
| Advancing the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System Past NOAA funding has provided for the development of the Caribbean Regional Association for Coastal Ocean Observing, CaRA, which has guided the development of the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System. As designed, CariCOOS has strived to identify and meet prioritized stakeholder needs for coastal information with an efficient design minimizing observing assets while developing complementary modeling tools. This initial system has proved effective in providing wind, wave and current data products as well as simulations supporting forecasting for the Atlantic and Caribbean insular shelves. Through the present proposal, we intend to complete the initial CariCOOS phase and develop the required observing, modeling and skill assessment assets and tools needed before proceeding on a shoreward extension of the CariCOOS product domains. Informational access to the near coastal and nearshore regions will allow us to bring our services to specific shore dependent activities/sectors such as port and harbors operations, recreational activities and coastal resource management. | |
| The Continued Development of the Northeastern Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System The overarching intent of this proposal is to continue operation and further the development of the integrated ocean observing system for the Northeast and to expand the user base through consultation and outreach. | |
| Sustaining NANOOS, the Pacific Northwest Component of the US IOOS Our goal is to sustain, and, depending on funding, enhance the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems (NANOOS), the Pacific Northwest Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System (RCOOS) that serves regional stakeholders in alignment with the vision of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). NANOOS seeks to maintain the integrated in-water and land-based observing systems, data management and communications, analyses and products, and education and outreach subsystems that it has developed, implemented, and integrated with NOAA IOOS and substantial leveraged funding. NANOOS will remain focused on delivering to diverse stakeholders data-based products and services that are easy to use, to address high-priority issues and aid decisionmaking. NANOOS will continue its proactive interactions with a wide range of PNW stakeholders, to prioritize and refine our observations, products, and outreach efforts. | |
| Development of an Autonomous Ammonium Flurescence Sensor (AAFS) with a View Towards In-situ Application Our goal is to develop a portable autonomous ammonium sensor. Such a sensor could be deployed for periods of up to a month aboard ships, moorings or drifting buoys or used as a component in lowered or towed oceanographic instrument packages for vertical profiling. | |
| TSA - A Two Scale Approximation for Wind-generated Ocean Surface Waves (a) To provide an accurate, efficient, computational model (two-scale approximation, TSA) for the 4-wave interactions, in operational wave forecast models, suitable for global, basin and coastal scale applications, and able to transition seamlessly from deep to shallow water. (b) Fully test TSA with respect to exact codes for the full Boltzmann integral (FBI), for durationlimited, fetch-limited wave growth, turning winds, swell-windsea, interactions, etc.(c) Numerically investigate and clarify the basis for TSA, its limitations, errors, enhancements,improvements, self-similarity properties, and spectral flux properties. (d) Implement TSA in a variety of modern operational wave forecast models, e.g. WAVEWATCHTM (WW3) and SWAN for extensive tests on important, realistic wave conditions. (e) Derive, adapt and implement new formulations for source terms, Sin and Sds, from recent literature and the NOPP partnership, with TSA, in modern wave models, for tests, including veering or accelerating winds, sea and swell interactions, and real storm cases. | |
| Integration of an Emerging Highly Sensitive Optical CO2 Sensor for Ocean Monitoring on an Existing Data Acquistion System SeaKeeper 1000 Develop a high-performance pCO2 sensor that is affordable enough to be deployed in great numbers to autonomously monitor the overall patterns of CO2 emissions and ocean acidification. | |
| Instantaneous Passive and Active Detection, Localization, Monitoring and Classification of Marine Mammals Over Long Ranges with High-Resolution Towed Array Measurements The objective of this proposal is to develop approaches to enable instantaneous passive and active acoustic detection, localization, continuous monitoring and classification of marine mammals over very wide areas spanning hundreds of kilometers or more in range. This will be accomplished using high-resolution receiver array measurements of marine mammal vocalizations (passive) and instantaneous wide-area ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing [1,2] (OAWRS) and imaging (active) of marine mammals. | |
| Implementation of the Great Lakes Observing System, 2011-2015 A fully integrated Great Lakes Observing System that provides products and services to decision-makers, resource managers and other data users with input from members and partners, to foster understanding and inform decision-making related to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River System. | |
| Initialization, Prediction and Diagnosis of the Rapid Intensification of Tropical Cyclones Using the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS 1. Improved initialization and skilful prediction of Tropical Cyclone (TC) track, structure and intensity.2. Improved prediction of Rapid Intensification (RI). 3. Improved understanding of the mechanisms of TC structure and intensity change, particularly Rapid Intensification. | |
| Autonomous Measurements of Oceanic Dissolved Nitrate from Commercially Available Profiling Floats Equipped with ISUS The goal of this work is to design, build, and produce a commercially available version of the In Situ Ultraviolet Spectrometer (ISUS) suitable for use on commercially-built profiling floats. Moored versions of ISUS already exist, and a profiling float version has been built and deployed, with excellent and exciting results. However, fabrication of the sensor and integration with the float have been to date difficult from an engineering perspective, and as a result possible by only a very few technical groups. The goal of this work is to simplify the design so that a commercial version of the float/ISUS can be produced and ultimately be widely used in the physical and biogeochemical oceanographic community. The partnership involved here collectively as the skills to meet this goal. | |
| Evaluating Potential Effects of Satellite Tagging in Large Whales: A Case Study with Gulf of Maine Humpback Whales This project is a study of satellite tag retention and health impacts among Gulf of Maine humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Its overall goal is to better understand short- and medium-term physical and physiological effects of Type 1 tags and to investigate the processes involved in tag rejection, failure and loss. This work is expected to inform future tag design and deployment, and particularly seeks to minimize impacts on whales while maximizing methodological performance. | |
| Acoustic Metadata Management and Transparent Access to Networked Oceanographic Data Sets The long-term goals of this effort are to produce software capable of organizing and archiving metadata associated with the detection of marine mammals. The focus is on acoustic detections, but other modalities of detection as well as measurements such as conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) casts are included. In addition, the software provides interfaces to access oceanographic measurements from other data repositories in a transparent manner. Data shall be accessible from a variety of languages used by the scientific community for analysis and modeling. | CeNCOOS: Integrating Marine Operations for Decision Makers and the General Public CeNCOOS is one of the eleven Regional Associations (RAs) comprising the national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). IOOS finds its legal basis in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2009. The task of the RAs is to �coordinate State, Federal, local, and private interests at a regional level with the responsibility of engaging the private and public sectors in designing, operating, and improving regional coastal and ocean observing systems in order to ensure the provision of data and information that meet the needs of user groups from the respective regions.� A major emphasis is on producing unique, specific products that meet the needs of end-users in four focus areas: Ecosystems and Climate, Water Quality, Marine Operations, and Coastal Hazards. |
| Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting with Theoretically-based Statistical Models The goal of this research is to improve tropical cyclone intensity prediction through a theoretical study of the hurricane inner core (i.e., within 100-km), the role of ocean structure on hurricane intensity, and the incorporation of those results in a simplified intensity prediction system. The intensity prediction system will be tested in an operational framework in the western North Pacific and provided to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) for evaluation. The intensity model is based on the statisticaldynamical logistic growth equation model (LGEM), which has generally been the most accurate operational intensity model in the Atlantic basin during the last several hurricane seasons. | |
| Developing Environmental Protocols and Monitoring to Support Ocean Renewable Energy and Stewardship, Topic 5: Sub-Seabed Geologic Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Best Management Practices The goal of this project is to compile and evaluate all pertinent information needed to generate a U.S. Best Management Practices (BMP) for sub-seabed geologic carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration in order to support BOEM�s regulatory framework for these types of projects. | |
| A Submersible Holographic Camera for the Undistirbed Characterization of Optically Relevant Particles in Water (HOLOCAM) Our long-term goal is to develop novel oceanographic instrumentation to address fundamental questions in ocean optics. The primary goal of this project is to develop a holographic instrument capable of imaging and characterizing natural (i.e. undisturbed) particle fields in the ocean. The longterm science goal is to understand the link between suspended particles and the bulk scattering properties of natural waters. We believe in-situ digital holographic microscopy, recently developed and employed for both fluid dynamics and biological studies, has the capability to obtain critical data relevant to this goal. | |
| The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (ACT): National-Scale Efforts Toward Verification and Validation of Observing Technologies The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (www.act-us.info) was established by NOAA in 2001 to bring about fundamental changes to innovation and engineering practices in marine technology. It arose at a time when the United States began moving toward the development and implementation of a sustained national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). ACT�s goal is to facilitate the creation and application of knowledge on current and emerging ocean-observing technologies to improve the capabilities of existing observations and deliver innovative solutions to specific emerging global environmental issues and operational ocean-observing challenges. | |
| Developing the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS) The primary goal of the proposed work is to continue the development of an operational ocean monitoring and forecasting system that provides integrated, customized, and timely products that enable an ocean-literate and well-informed public and policy makers. PacIOOS has focused initial development on water quality sensing, ocean-state and forecasting, the provision of marine ecosystem information, prediction of coastal hazards, and the development of integrated data visualization capabilities to inform marine spatial planning, operations, commerce, and recreation. Through this proposed effort, PacIOOS will enhance development of observing and product suites in each of the aforementioned focus areas and will continue to engage users, stakeholders, and system partners in the use, extension, education, and outreach of technical capacity, data visualization, and ocean information. | |
| FY 2011 Implementation of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) The Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) is one of eleven regions that contribute to the national U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS�). The regional observing systems work to collect, integrate, and deliver coastal and ocean observations in order to improve safety, enhance the economy, and protect the environment. The primary goal of SCCOOS is to provide the scientific data and information needed to inform decision-making and better understand the changing conditions of the coastal ocean in Southern California. | |
| Augmentation of Early Intensity Forecasting in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goals of our research team are twofold: 1. To develop a suite of objective intensity estimation tools that are based on remote sensing data and multiparameter spatiotemporal analysis tools. 2. To understand the physical mechanisms giving rise to the observable signatures that are used for forecasting. | |
| Achieving Superior Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts by Improving the Assimilation of High-Resolution Satellite Data into Mesoscale Prediction Models Forecasts of TC intensity change are often lacking in skill due in part to the paucity of conventional observations over the oceans that are assimilated into the operational models. The inability to accurately map the three-dimensional atmosphere and the underlying upper ocean has also constrained our understanding of how intensity fluctuations are governed by internal and environmental processes. Remotely-sensed observations from multiple satellite sources have become more routinely available as part of the atmospheric/oceanic observing system. As an important input to global numerical data assimilation and forecast systems, these data are providing crucial large-scale environmental information for better predicting such parameters as TC steering flow fields. However, in regards to TC intensity change, it is clear that a dedicated research effort is needed to optimize the satellite data processing strategies, assimilation, and applications within a higher resolution modeling framework. Contemporary strategies developed for assimilating satellite data into global NWP systems appear to be inadequate for retaining information on the scales of processes pertinent to TC analysis and intensity change. Our study attempts to focus on and evaluate the impact of integrated, full resolution, multi-variate satellite data on TC intensity forecasts using advanced data assimilation methods and coupled ocean-atmosphere mesoscale forecast models. The development of successful strategies to optimally assimilate satellite-derived data should ultimately lead to improved numerical forecasts of TC intensity. | |
| Atlantic MOC Observing System Studies Using Adjoint Models To understand, with a comprehensive data set and a state-of-the-art ocean model, the nature of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, with a particular emphasis on its long term variability and climate consequences. | |
Fiscal Year 2011 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Improving Attachments of Remotely-deployed Dorsal Fin-mounted Tags: Tissue Structure, Hydrodynamics, In-situ Performance, and Tagged-animal Follow-up We recently developed small satellite-linked telemetry tags that are anchored with small attachment darts to the dorsal fins of small- and medium-sized cetaceans. These Low Impact Minimally-Percutaneous External-electronics Transmitter (LIMPET) tags have opened up the potential to monitor the movements of numerous species not previously accessible because they were too large or difficult to capture safely, but too small for tags that implant deeply within the body. One goal of this project is to improve upon our existing tagging methodology to achieve longer, less variable attachment durations by carefully examining the factors that affect attachment success. Our key goal is to develop a method for attaching tags to cetaceans that provides the data needed to answer critical conservation and management questions without an adverse effect on the tagged animal. Therefore, we will also conduct follow-up studies of whales that have been tagged with a remotely-deployed dorsal finmounted tag to accurately quantify wound healing and the effects of tagging on whale survival, reproduction, and behavior. The combination of these approaches will provide an improved understanding of some of the key factors affecting tag attachment duration as well as a more complete understanding of impacts to individuals due to tagging. | |
| Wave Dissipation and Balance - NOPPP Wave Project Wind-generated waves play a prominent role at the interfaces of the ocean with the atmosphere, land and solid Earth. Waves also define in many ways the appearance of the ocean seen by remote-sensing instruments. Beyond these geophysical aspects, waves also affect human activities at sea and on the coast. The long-term goals of this research are to obtain a better understanding of the physical processes that affect ocean surface waves and their interactions with ocean currents and turbulence, seismic waves, sediments and remote sensing systems, and to improve our forecasting and hindcasting capacity of these phenomena from the global ocean to the nearshore scale. | |
| Observation-Based Dissipation and Input Terms for Spectral Wave Models, with End-User Testing The long-term goal is to implement input and dissipation source functions, based on advanced understanding of physics of air-sea interactions, wave breaking and swell attenuation, in waveforecast models. | |
| Refined Source Terms in WAVEWATCH III with Wave Breaking and Sea Spray Forecasts Several U.S. Federal Agencies operate wind wave prediction models for a variety of mission specific purposes. Much of the basic science contained in the physics core of these models is over a decade old, and incorporating recent research advances over the last decade will significantly upgrade the model physics. A major goal is to produce a refined set of source and sink terms for the wind input, dissipation and breaking, nonlinear wave-wave interaction, bottom friction, wave-mud interaction, wave-current interaction as well as sea spray flux. These should perform demonstrably better across a range of environments and conditions than existing packages and include a seamless transition from deep to shallow water outside the surf zone. After careful testing within a comprehensive suite of test bed cases, these refined source terms will be incorporated into the prediction systems operated by these agencies and by the broader wave modelling community. | |
| Development, Assessment, and Commercialization of a Biogeochemical Profiling Float for Calibration and Validation of Ocean Color and Ocean Carbon Studies This document reports the progress on this project between 1 August, 2010 and 26 August, 2011. At completion of this project we will have integrated existing high precision bio-optical sensors (both active and passive) onto profiling floats, deployed and tested the floats in interesting dynamic ocean regimes, and demonstrated the efficacy of this stable, autonomous and sustainable technology for a.) the calibration and product validation of orbiting ocean color radiometers and b.) investigation of the dynamics of carbon in the upper ocean on time and space scales appropriate for the evaluation of the role of the ocean in the global carbon cycle. The work is a collaborative project between seven partners. University of Maine has coordinated the work, provided guidance and standards for the mission�s science goals, and deployed and tested the instruments. WET Labs and Satlantic have modified and produced instruments, housings, and control software. Teledyne Webb Research has integrated their float software and hardware with the new instruments and flexible mission parameters needed for this project. CLS America has developed protocols for handling both the new data and the two-way communication it requires. NASA-Goddard and CLS America are developing tools that integrate real-time float data with NASA�s satellite products around the location and time of the float�s surfacing. Laboratoire d�Oceanographie, Villefranche-sur-mer (unfunded collaborator) has provided a ship of opportunity and support for deployment and evaluation of the float and is sharing expertise on calibration and validation activities and on the use of profiling floats with optical sensors. | |
| Deepwater Program: Exploration and Research of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Natural and Artificial Hard Bottom Habitats with Emphasis on Coral Communities: Reefs, Rigs and Wrecks A primary goal of this study is to obtain a robust predictive capability for the occurrence of rich cnidarian (primarily scleractinian coral) hard ground communities in the deep Gulf of Mexico (GoM). To achieve this long-term goal, this study will accomplish three interrelated and interdependent objectives. | |
| Examination of Health Effects and Long-term Impacts of Deployments of Multiple Tag Types on Blue, Humpback, and Gray Whales in the Eastern North Pacific Despite extensive use of implant tags for more than 30 years, only limited studies have been conducted of the health effects and long-term consequences of tag deployments on whales. This field is rapidly expanding including increased use of deep penetration tags on many populations including critically endangered populations such as the North Pacific right whale and the western gray whale. Studies of North Atlantic rights whales revealed a wide variety of conditions of the tag site after deployments of penetration tags varying from very minor divots to more extensive swellings. Our goal is to provide new insights into the long term consequences of different types of tags on several additional species of large whales including blue, humpback, and gray whales by conducting long term follow up of previously tagged individuals in the eastern North Pacific. We examine the long term impacts on health, reproduction, and mortality unitizing the past deployments of implant and suction cup tags on blue, humpback, and gray whales in the eastern North Pacific and our extensive monitoring of these populations. | |
| Next Generation of Advanced Laser Fluorescence Technology for Characterization of Natural Aquatic Environments The project research addresses our long-term goal to develop an analytical suite of the Advanced Laser Fluorescence (ALF) methods and instruments to improve our capacity for characterization of aquatic environments. The ALF technique (Chekalyuk and Hafez, 2008) uniquely combines spectrally and temporally resolved measurements of the laser-stimulated emission (LSE) to provide assessments of key variables, including chlorophyll a (Chl a), chromophoric dissolved organic matter (CDOM), and phycobiliprotein-containing phytoplankton and cyanobacteria. The pump-during-probe measurements of variable fluorescence, Fv/Fm, yield assessments of phytoplankton photophysiological status. An extensive series of ALF measurments in diverse water types has demonstrated ALF utility as an integrated tool for aquatic research and observations. The ALF integration into the major oceanographic programs is currently in progress, including the California Current Ecosystem Long Term Ecological Research (CCE LTER, NSF) and California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI, NOAA). | |
| A Unified Air-Sea Interface for Fully-Coupled Atmosphere-Wave-Ocean Models for Improving Intensity Prediction of Tropical Cyclones The goals of this PI team are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and its impact on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs), and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface that is flexible for use in a multi-model system and portable for transition to the next generation research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-land models. | |
| Impacts of Turbulence on Hurricane Intensity Our recent studies have shown that hurricane boundary layer turbulence, which must be parameterized in the current-generation weather-prediction models, plays a significant role in controlling the hurricane intensity. We find that horizontal turbulence, particularly in the radial direction (i.e., towards or away from the hurricane center), plays an important role in regulating hurricane intensity. The longterm goal of this project is thus to improve the hurricane intensity forecast by developing a more physically based horizontal turbulence parameterization scheme for hurricanes. | |
| Portable and Persistent Autonomous Real-Time Marine Mammal Acoustic Monitoring Current marine mammal monitoring (MMM) methods that use archival recorders or towed hydrophone arrays have the disadvantages of being analyzed long after the acoustic events of interest, or being subject to the noise of the ship towing the array and require dedicated on-ship computers and human reviewers to acquire and process the data, respectively. To overcome these disadvantages, this joint work involving the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (CLO) Bioacoustics Research Program (BRP) and SAIC, Inc. will integrate archival recorder electronics and a broad and satellite communications system with on-board detection, classification, and localization (DCL) software onto a Wave-Powered Glider Persistent Autonomous Vehicle ("WaveGlider" from Liquid Robotics, Inc.), to develop a mobile marine mammal monitor (hereafter �M4�) capable of transmitting DCL data in near real-time to an on-ship or on-shore Data Management and Communications (DMAC) receiver. | |
| An Ocean Observing System for Large-Scale Monitoring and Mapping of Noise Throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary The project goals were to map the low-frequency (<1000 Hz) ocean noise budget throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) ecosystem, identify and quantify the contributing sources of anthropogenic sounds within that ecosystem, and determine whether or not such noises have the potential to impact endangered marine mammals and fishes that use the Sanctuary. | |
| Visual Impact Evaluation System for Offshore Renewable Energy (VIESORE) VIESORE is an analytical and visualization tool for offshore renewable energy facilities, to be used by Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) staff to conduct National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) consultation when assessing impacts on the human environment and examining alternatives for in-house and public outreach � systematically and transparently. In 2009, the United States Department of Interior (DOI) completed its Final Renewable Energy Framework. This rule established a program for granting leases, easements, and rights-of-way (ROW) for the development of renewable energy. Renewable energy projects encouraged as part of this final rule include offshore wind facilities, along with wave and ocean current facilities. As a response to the increasing interest in the use of waters of the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) for offshore renewable energy, the DOI�s BOEM has sought ways to ensure that proposed projects meet all applicable environmental laws and regulations, in hopes of streamlining the development of these facilities. As part of this effort, BOEM is sponsoring the development of an in-house computer-based system to evaluate potential visual impacts resulting from the construction and operation of offshore renewable energy facilities. The system is referred to as the Visual Impact Evaluation System for Offshore Renewable Energy (VIESORE). VIESORE is a geographic information system-based (GIS-based) software tool for creating spatially accurate and realistic visualizations of offshore renewable energy facilities, including offshore wind, wave, and ocean current facilities. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea-Surface Temperature (MISST) for IOOS Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is vital to coastal and marine spatial planning, global weather prediction, climate change studies, search and rescue, and ecosystem based management. SST is derived from measurements taken by numerous satellites carrying infrared and microwave radiometers, and measured from moored buoys, drifting buoys, and ships. This project focuses on completing research to improve the quality of the satellite SSTs from existing and new sensors, produce multi-sensor blended gap-free SSTs from US and international datasets, and successfully broaden the use of these products within specifically targeting coastal applications and the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). | |
| Advanced Coupled Atmosphere-wave-ocean Modeling for Improving Tropical Cyclone Prediction Models The goals of this PI team are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and their impacts on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs) and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface for use in a multi-model system that can transition to the next generation of research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-land models. | |
| Expansion of Metadata Management, Visualization and Data Processing Functionality of OBIS-SEAMAP for Passive Acoustic Monitoring Data In the light of increasing usage of passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) data, expanding research on PAM data collection and mounting demands to incorporating PAM data into habitat modeling and marine spatial planning, this project aims to enhance the standards and accessibility of PAM data to develop novel tools for advanced spatio-temporal analyses and visualization and to improve interoperability of PAM data among institutions hosting PAM data. | |
| Bayesian Integration for Marine Spatial Planning and Renewable Energy Siting The primary goal of the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP) study, BAYESIAN INTEGRATION FOR MARINE SPATIAL PLANNING AND RENEWABLE ENERGY SITING is to develop a multicriteria decision support tool that improves the quality of information upon which marine spatial planning decisions are made. The project team�s goal is to develop a decision support tool that integrates scientific, economic and physical information associated with ocean conditions and activities with uncertainty values and critical stakeholder input to better inform the decision maker in siting renewable energy project on the Pacific coast of the United States. | |
| Developing ChemFinTM, a Miniature Biogeochemical Sensor Payload for Gliders, Profilers, and other AUVs The first goal of this project involves the further development and transition of ChemFINTM, a prototype autonomous profiling sensor for chemicals and biomolecules, into a commercial product that can be readily deployed on fixed or mobile ocean observation platforms such as coastal gliders, profiling moorings, and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The second goal of this project is to integrate a flow immunosensor technology (i.e. biosensor), developed by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, into ChemFIN for the detection of biomolecules of interest, such as specific biotoxins (i.e saxitoxin) that are released during harmful algal blooms (HABs). ChemFIN is being developed for sustained, autonomous ocean observations of specific chemical and biochemical distributions and spatial and temporal variability. ChemFIN is an evolving compact sensor payload, utilizing microfluidics, and is particularly designed for �low-power� underway measurements on gliders, propeller-driven autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous profilers. | |
| Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA): Coordinated Monitoring, Prediction and Assessment to Support Decision-Makers Needs for Coastal and Ocean Data and Tools The long-term goal of this project is to integrate and augment existing observational, modeling, data management and education assets in the Southeast Coastal Ocean Observing Regional Association (SECOORA) domain to create an end-to-end Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System (RCOOS) in support of user-defined needs for improved coastal and ocean decision making. | |
| Evaluating Acoustic Technologies to Monitor Aquatic Organisms at Renewable Energy Sites The long-term goal of this program is to quantify and evaluate the ability of three active acoustic technologies (echosounder, multibeam sonar, and acoustic camera) to characterize and monitor animal densities and distributions at a proposed hydrokinetic site. Data from stationary, bottom-mounted acoustic packages will be compared to that from a mobile, surface survey. Results from this study will inform the choice, deployment, and data analyses of acoustic instrumentation use at marine hydrokinetic (MHK) sites. | |
| Modeling Wind Wave Evolution from Deep to Shallow Water Ocean waves are an important aspect of upper ocean dynamics, in particular on the shallow continental shelves and in coastal areas. The long-term objective of this work is to advance modeling capability in such coastal areas by improving model representations of effects associated with nonlinearity, inhomogeneity, and dissipation. | |
| Continued Development of the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System The overarching goal of this project is to build a robust, user-driven, sustained, operational Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS). The specific goals of this project are to maintain the existing GCOOS capabilities and, as funding allows, to augment the existing observations to fill gaps and provide enhanced products and services. GCOOS capabilities include components to integrate data sets from diverse providers; assure consistency, quality, and accuracy of the data; create new products needed by users; and provide in a timely and efficient manner the data, products, and services needed by decision-makers, diverse stakeholders, and the public. Physical, meteorological,biogeochemical, and bathymetrical data are major components of the data system. | |
| Development of an Integrated ISFET pH Sensor for High Pressure Applications in the Deep-sea The long-term goals of this project are to enable observations of pH in the ocean using sensors deployed on autonomous platforms. These systems will enable robust, basin-scale observations of changing pH driven by natural and anthropogenic processes. | |
| Nonlinear and Dissipation Characteristics of Ocean Surface Waves in Estuarine Environments The overall goal of this work is the development of computational modules for the dissipation of surface wave energy due to expanses of bottom mud and marshland vegetation. The computational modules would represent both the dissipative effects on the surface waves and the effects of dissipation on other processes of wave transformation and evolution, with particular attention paid to the nonlinear energy exchange among wave frequencies. In addition these modules would allow for feedback between the surface wave and the energy dissipating feature. | |
| Protocols for Baseline Studies and Monitoring for Ocean Renewable Energy The long-term goal of this project is the development and broad application of a Protocol Framework for identifying, collecting and comparing environmental data relevant to offshore renewable energy projects. The Protocol Framework will outline the process for defining priority environmental interactions and the associated baseline and operational monitoring study protocols for wave, tidal, and offshore wind projects on the U.S. West Coast (California Current large marine ecosystem [LME]). | |
| Alaska Regional Coastal and Ocean Observing System The long-term goals of this project represent the priorities identified by stakeholder workshops and adopted by the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS) Board: 1) Increase access to existing coastal and ocean data; 2) Package information and data in useful ways to meet the needs of stakeholders; and 3) Increase observing and forecasting capacity in all regions of the state, with a priority on the Arctic and the northern Gulf of Alaska. | |
| Developing Environmental Protocols and Modeling Tools to Support Ocean Renewable Energy and Stewardship The long term goals of this project are to develop and test standardized protocols for baseline studies and monitoring for the collection and comparison of scientifically valid and comparable data for specific offshore renewable energy issues that seamlessly integrate with a newly designed conceptual framework and approach for cumulative environmental impact evaluation of offshore renewable energy development. | |
| Roadmap: Technologies for Cost Effective, Spatial Resource Assessments for Offshore Renewable Energy It has been estimated that the renewable energy in the oceans (offshore wind, waves and tides) could provide all of the world�s demand for electricity, but many challenges must be met prior to realizing even a small fraction of that potential. One of the challenges is the ability to sense the resources and their surrounding environments. Today the standard is to place a fixed structure in the ocean or to have people periodically visit a location to do assessments. This is unacceptable for two reasons: 1) Cost � The costs of a ocean meteorological (Met) tower is in the range $2-4 million. Site surveys are less expensive, but they are manpower intensive, and it is difficult to acquire simultaneous observations. 2) Spatial Information � There is a need to measure environmental parameters from the seafloor through the top of the marine atmospheric surface boundary layer, and over areas of hundreds of square miles. Current techniques, for example using anemometers, current meters and wave buoys, provide information only at discrete points, and understanding spatial correlations requires careful inter-calibration and maintenance of separate sensors. This is difficult enough on land, where there is generally easy access to the instruments, but is unrealistic at sea. By contrast, remote sensing technologies can provide continuous observations over extended spatial regions (in either the horizontal or vertical). Such information can be applies by developers and operators of wind and MHK power conversion devices for a wide range of tasks from local control and response optimization to predicting short-term fluctuations in winds, waves and currents, to long-term resource assessment. The New England Marine Renewable Energy Center (MREC) is funded under National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) solicitation, M10PS00152 to develop a roadmap for cost effective, spatial resource assessments for offshore renewable energy development. | |
| Data Assimilation and Predictability Studies for Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts This project aims to understand and improve the forecast of Tropical Cyclone (TC) lifecycle evolution and intensity, focusing on both large-scale environment and mesoscale phenomena in the TC system, which are major components responsible for intensity change. Two major challenges in TC intensity forecasting are the general lack of observations in the vicinity of TCs and the adaptive representation of the forecast error covariance. This project attempts to address both challenges for improving TC intensity forecasting. | |
| Improving Attachments of Non-Invasive (Type III) Electronic Data Loggers to Cetaceans The overall goal of this project is to increase the longevity of suction cup attachments for short term archival tags such as the DTAG. Specifically, we are working to extend the routine attachment duration for suction cup tags to multiple days, if not weeks. Methods will be developed to extend tag attachment by streamlining tag housings, selecting appropriate materials for tag/cup assembly, improving suction cup design, understanding the behavior of the attachment surface during attachment, and investigating the possible use of adhesives. | |
| Advancing the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System Past NOAA funding has provided for the development of the Caribbean Regional Association for Coastal Ocean Observing, CaRA, which has guided the development of the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System. As designed, CariCOOS has strived to identify and meet prioritized stakeholder needs for coastal information with an efficient design minimizing observing assets while developing complementary modeling tools. This initial system has proved effective in providing wind, wave and current data products as well as simulations supporting forecasting for the Atlantic and Caribbean insular shelves. Through the present proposal, we intend to complete the initial CariCOOS phase and develop the required observing, modeling and skill assessment assets and tools needed before proceeding on a shoreward extension of the CariCOOS product domains. Informational access to the near coastal and nearshore regions will allow us to bring our services to specific shore dependent activities/sectors such as port and harbors operations, recreational activities and coastal resource management. | |
| The Continued Development of the Northeastern Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System The overarching intent of this proposal is to continue operation and further the development of the integrated ocean observing system for the Northeast and to expand the user base through consultation and outreach. | |
| Sustaining NANOOS, the Pacific Northwest Component of the US IOOS Our goal is to sustain, and, depending on funding, enhance the Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems (NANOOS), the Pacific Northwest Regional Coastal Ocean Observing System (RCOOS) that serves regional stakeholders in alignment with the vision of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). NANOOS seeks to maintain the integrated in-water and land-based observing systems, data management and communications, analyses and products, and education and outreach subsystems that it has developed, implemented, and integrated with NOAA IOOS and substantial leveraged funding. NANOOS will remain focused on delivering to diverse stakeholders data-based products and services that are easy to use, to address high-priority issues and aid decisionmaking. NANOOS will continue its proactive interactions with a wide range of PNW stakeholders, to prioritize and refine our observations, products, and outreach efforts. | |
| Development of an Autonomous Ammonium Flurescence Sensor (AAFS) with a View Towards In-situ Application Our goal is to develop a portable autonomous ammonium sensor. Such a sensor could be deployed for periods of up to a month aboard ships, moorings or drifting buoys or used as a component in lowered or towed oceanographic instrument packages for vertical profiling. | |
| TSA - A Two Scale Approximation for Wind-generated Ocean Surface Waves (a) To provide an accurate, efficient, computational model (two-scale approximation, TSA) for the 4-wave interactions, in operational wave forecast models, suitable for global, basin and coastal scale applications, and able to transition seamlessly from deep to shallow water. (b) Fully test TSA with respect to exact codes for the full Boltzmann integral (FBI), for durationlimited, fetch-limited wave growth, turning winds, swell-windsea, interactions, etc.(c) Numerically investigate and clarify the basis for TSA, its limitations, errors, enhancements,improvements, self-similarity properties, and spectral flux properties. (d) Implement TSA in a variety of modern operational wave forecast models, e.g. WAVEWATCHTM (WW3) and SWAN for extensive tests on important, realistic wave conditions. (e) Derive, adapt and implement new formulations for source terms, Sin and Sds, from recent literature and the NOPP partnership, with TSA, in modern wave models, for tests, including veering or accelerating winds, sea and swell interactions, and real storm cases. | |
| Integration of an Emerging Highly Sensitive Optical CO2 Sensor for Ocean Monitoring on an Existing Data Acquistion System SeaKeeper 1000 Develop a high-performance pCO2 sensor that is affordable enough to be deployed in great numbers to autonomously monitor the overall patterns of CO2 emissions and ocean acidification. | |
| Instantaneous Passive and Active Detection, Localization, Monitoring and Classification of Marine Mammals Over Long Ranges with High-Resolution Towed Array Measurements The objective of this proposal is to develop approaches to enable instantaneous passive and active acoustic detection, localization, continuous monitoring and classification of marine mammals over very wide areas spanning hundreds of kilometers or more in range. This will be accomplished using high-resolution receiver array measurements of marine mammal vocalizations (passive) and instantaneous wide-area ocean acoustic waveguide remote sensing [1,2] (OAWRS) and imaging (active) of marine mammals. | |
| Implementation of the Great Lakes Observing System, 2011-2015 A fully integrated Great Lakes Observing System that provides products and services to decision-makers, resource managers and other data users with input from members and partners, to foster understanding and inform decision-making related to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River System. | |
| Initialization, Prediction and Diagnosis of the Rapid Intensification of Tropical Cyclones Using the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS 1. Improved initialization and skilful prediction of Tropical Cyclone (TC) track, structure and intensity.2. Improved prediction of Rapid Intensification (RI). 3. Improved understanding of the mechanisms of TC structure and intensity change, particularly Rapid Intensification. | |
| Autonomous Measurements of Oceanic Dissolved Nitrate from Commercially Available Profiling Floats Equipped with ISUS The goal of this work is to design, build, and produce a commercially available version of the In Situ Ultraviolet Spectrometer (ISUS) suitable for use on commercially-built profiling floats. Moored versions of ISUS already exist, and a profiling float version has been built and deployed, with excellent and exciting results. However, fabrication of the sensor and integration with the float have been to date difficult from an engineering perspective, and as a result possible by only a very few technical groups. The goal of this work is to simplify the design so that a commercial version of the float/ISUS can be produced and ultimately be widely used in the physical and biogeochemical oceanographic community. The partnership involved here collectively as the skills to meet this goal. | |
| Evaluating Potential Effects of Satellite Tagging in Large Whales: A Case Study with Gulf of Maine Humpback Whales This project is a study of satellite tag retention and health impacts among Gulf of Maine humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Its overall goal is to better understand short- and medium-term physical and physiological effects of Type 1 tags and to investigate the processes involved in tag rejection, failure and loss. This work is expected to inform future tag design and deployment, and particularly seeks to minimize impacts on whales while maximizing methodological performance. | |
| Acoustic Metadata Management and Transparent Access to Networked Oceanographic Data Sets The long-term goals of this effort are to produce software capable of organizing and archiving metadata associated with the detection of marine mammals. The focus is on acoustic detections, but other modalities of detection as well as measurements such as conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) casts are included. In addition, the software provides interfaces to access oceanographic measurements from other data repositories in a transparent manner. Data shall be accessible from a variety of languages used by the scientific community for analysis and modeling. | |
| The Argo Project: Global Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Program ( http://www.argo.ucsd.edu ), a global array of autonomous profiling floats, is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 4 of the 5-year �sustained phase� of the project, which builds on progress made under previous awards (Phases 1,2 and 3) for pilot float arrays, data system development, and global implementation. As of November 1, 2007, the international Argo Program, including the US contribution, has met its goal of building a global array of 3000 active profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2001, 2002, Gould et al., 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. In order to maintain the Argo array, it is necessary to replace over 25% (800) of the instruments every year. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). | CeNCOOS: Integrating Marine Operations for Decision Makers and the General Public CeNCOOS is one of the eleven Regional Associations (RAs) comprising the national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). IOOS finds its legal basis in the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which was signed into law by President Barack Obama on March 30, 2009. The task of the RAs is to �coordinate State, Federal, local, and private interests at a regional level with the responsibility of engaging the private and public sectors in designing, operating, and improving regional coastal and ocean observing systems in order to ensure the provision of data and information that meet the needs of user groups from the respective regions.� A major emphasis is on producing unique, specific products that meet the needs of end-users in four focus areas: Ecosystems and Climate, Water Quality, Marine Operations, and Coastal Hazards. |
| Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting with Theoretically-based Statistical Models The goal of this research is to improve tropical cyclone intensity prediction through a theoretical study of the hurricane inner core (i.e., within 100-km), the role of ocean structure on hurricane intensity, and the incorporation of those results in a simplified intensity prediction system. The intensity prediction system will be tested in an operational framework in the western North Pacific and provided to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) for evaluation. The intensity model is based on the statisticaldynamical logistic growth equation model (LGEM), which has generally been the most accurate operational intensity model in the Atlantic basin during the last several hurricane seasons. | |
| Developing Environmental Protocols and Monitoring to Support Ocean Renewable Energy and Stewardship, Topic 5: Sub-Seabed Geologic Carbon Dioxide Sequestration Best Management Practices The goal of this project is to compile and evaluate all pertinent information needed to generate a U.S. Best Management Practices (BMP) for sub-seabed geologic carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration in order to support BOEM�s regulatory framework for these types of projects. | |
| A Submersible Holographic Camera for the Undistirbed Characterization of Optically Relevant Particles in Water (HOLOCAM) Our long-term goal is to develop novel oceanographic instrumentation to address fundamental questions in ocean optics. The primary goal of this project is to develop a holographic instrument capable of imaging and characterizing natural (i.e. undisturbed) particle fields in the ocean. The longterm science goal is to understand the link between suspended particles and the bulk scattering properties of natural waters. We believe in-situ digital holographic microscopy, recently developed and employed for both fluid dynamics and biological studies, has the capability to obtain critical data relevant to this goal. | |
| The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (ACT): National-Scale Efforts Toward Verification and Validation of Observing Technologies The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (www.act-us.info) was established by NOAA in 2001 to bring about fundamental changes to innovation and engineering practices in marine technology. It arose at a time when the United States began moving toward the development and implementation of a sustained national Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS). ACT�s goal is to facilitate the creation and application of knowledge on current and emerging ocean-observing technologies to improve the capabilities of existing observations and deliver innovative solutions to specific emerging global environmental issues and operational ocean-observing challenges. | |
| Developing the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS) The primary goal of the proposed work is to continue the development of an operational ocean monitoring and forecasting system that provides integrated, customized, and timely products that enable an ocean-literate and well-informed public and policy makers. PacIOOS has focused initial development on water quality sensing, ocean-state and forecasting, the provision of marine ecosystem information, prediction of coastal hazards, and the development of integrated data visualization capabilities to inform marine spatial planning, operations, commerce, and recreation. Through this proposed effort, PacIOOS will enhance development of observing and product suites in each of the aforementioned focus areas and will continue to engage users, stakeholders, and system partners in the use, extension, education, and outreach of technical capacity, data visualization, and ocean information. | |
| FY 2011 Implementation of the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) The Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System (SCCOOS) is one of eleven regions that contribute to the national U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS�). The regional observing systems work to collect, integrate, and deliver coastal and ocean observations in order to improve safety, enhance the economy, and protect the environment. The primary goal of SCCOOS is to provide the scientific data and information needed to inform decision-making and better understand the changing conditions of the coastal ocean in Southern California. | |
| Augmentation of Early Intensity Forecasting in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goals of our research team are twofold: 1. To develop a suite of objective intensity estimation tools that are based on remote sensing data and multiparameter spatiotemporal analysis tools. 2. To understand the physical mechanisms giving rise to the observable signatures that are used for forecasting. | |
| Achieving Superior Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts by Improving the Assimilation of High-Resolution Satellite Data into Mesoscale Prediction Models Forecasts of TC intensity change are often lacking in skill due in part to the paucity of conventional observations over the oceans that are assimilated into the operational models. The inability to accurately map the three-dimensional atmosphere and the underlying upper ocean has also constrained our understanding of how intensity fluctuations are governed by internal and environmental processes. Remotely-sensed observations from multiple satellite sources have become more routinely available as part of the atmospheric/oceanic observing system. As an important input to global numerical data assimilation and forecast systems, these data are providing crucial large-scale environmental information for better predicting such parameters as TC steering flow fields. However, in regards to TC intensity change, it is clear that a dedicated research effort is needed to optimize the satellite data processing strategies, assimilation, and applications within a higher resolution modeling framework. Contemporary strategies developed for assimilating satellite data into global NWP systems appear to be inadequate for retaining information on the scales of processes pertinent to TC analysis and intensity change. Our study attempts to focus on and evaluate the impact of integrated, full resolution, multi-variate satellite data on TC intensity forecasts using advanced data assimilation methods and coupled ocean-atmosphere mesoscale forecast models. The development of successful strategies to optimally assimilate satellite-derived data should ultimately lead to improved numerical forecasts of TC intensity. | |
| Atlantic MOC Observing System Studies Using Adjoint Models To understand, with a comprehensive data set and a state-of-the-art ocean model, the nature of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, with a particular emphasis on its long term variability and climate consequences. | |
Fiscal Year 2010 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Improving Attachments of Remotely-deployed Dorsal Fin-mounted Tags: Tissue Structure, Hydrodynamics, In-situ Performance, and Tagged-animal Follow-up The main goal is to improve upon our existing tagging methodology to achieve longer, less variable attachment durations by carefully examining the factors that affect attachment success. We will strive to develop a method for attaching tags to cetaceans that provides the data needed to answer critical conservation and management questions without an adverse affect on the tagged animal. | |
| Ocean Wave Dissipation and Energy Balance (WAVE-DB): Toward Reliable Spectra and First Breaking Waves The long-term goals of this research are to obtain a better understanding of the physical processes that affect ocean surface waves and their interactions with ocean currents and turbulence, seismic waves, sediments and remote sensing systems, and to improve our forecasting and hindcasting capacity of these phenomena from the global ocean to the nearshore scale. | |
| Observation-Based Dissipation and Input Terms for Spectral Wave Models, with End-User Testing The long-term goal is to implement wind-input and whitecapping-dissipation source functions, based on advanced understanding of physics of air-sea interactions and wave breaking, in waveforecast models. | |
| Refined Source Terms in WAVEWATCH III with Wave Breaking and Sea Spray Forecasts A major goal is to produce a refined set of source and sink terms for the wind input,dissipation and breaking, nonlinear wave-wave interaction, bottom friction, wave-mud interaction, wave-current interaction as well as sea spray flux. | |
| Long-term in situ chemical sensors for monitoring nutrients: phosphate sensor commercialization and ammonium sensor development The long-term goals of this project are to 1) transition the CYCLE-Phosphate sensor from a prototype to a fully functional commercial product to enable sustained observations of phosphate concentration for detailed investigations of biogeochemical variability in open ocean and coastal environments, and 2) develop an in situ ammonium sensing capability along with the phosphate sensor, thereby allowing comprehensive research to be conducted on the impacts and controls of nutrient cycling in coastal and nearshore ecosystems. | |
| Development, Assessment, and Commercialization of a Biogeochemical Profiling Float for Calibration and Validation of Ocean Color and Ocean Carbon Studies The primary goals of this effort are to develop the technology and expertise to measure optical properties of the upper ocean autonomously over long time scales (months to years) and to make those observations easily accessible to researchers and the public. This will allow monitoring of events such as phytoplankton blooms and will aid in our understanding of physical and biogeochemical dynamics of the upper ocean. | |
| Deepwater Program: Exploration and Research of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Natural and Artificial Hard Bottom Habitats with Emphasis on Coral Communities: Reefs, Rigs and Wrecks A primary goal of this study is to obtain a robust predictive capability for the occurrence of rich cnidarian (primarily scleractinian coral) hard ground communities in the deep Gulf of Mexico. | |
| Examination of Health Effects and Long-term Impacts of Deployments of Multiple Tag Types on Blue, Humpback, and Gray Whales in the Eastern North Pacific The goal of the project is to examine the long-term impacts of deployment of several types of tags, especially deep implant satellite tags that have been deployed on blue, humpback, and gray whales in the eastern North Pacific and to identify types of impacts and ways these might be reduced. | |
| Next Generation of Advanced Laser Fluorescence Technology for Characterization of Natural Aquatic Environments The long-term goal is to develop an analytical suite of the Advanced Laser Fluorescence (ALF) methods and instruments to improve our capacity for characterization of aquatic environments. | |
| A Unified Air-Sea Interface for Fully Coupled Atmosphere-Wave-Ocean Models for Improving Intensity Prediction of Tropical Cyclones The goals are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and its impact on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs), and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface that is flexible for use in a multi-model system and portable for transition to the next generation research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-land models. | |
| Impacts of Turbulence on Hurricane Intensity The turbulence effect on the hurricane intensity can be quantified only if the turbulences can be resolved in the numerical models. One objective of the current project is to perform a set of large-eddy simulations with increasing resolution until the statistics are converged. These simulations will then be analyzed to estimate eddy-diffusion coefficients for use in weather-prediction models. | |
| An Ocean Observing System for Large-Scale Monitoring and Mapping of Noise Throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary The project goals are to map the low-frequency (<1000 Hz) ocean noise budget throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) ecosystem, identify and quantify the contributing sources of anthropogenic sounds within that ecosystem, and determine whether or not such noises have the potential to impact endangered marine mammals and fishes that use the Sanctuary. | |
| An Autonomous Indicator-based pH Sensor for Oceanographic Research and Monitoring The long-term goal of the project is to make more autonomous chemical and biological sensors available to the oceanographic research community. These autonomous sensors will enable researchers able to more effectively study processes such as natural CO2 sequestration and ocean acidification. | |
| Mid-Frequency Sonar Interactions with Beaked Whales The top-level goal of this project is to build an interactive online modeling and visualization system, called the Virtual Beaked Whale. This will enable users to predict mid-frequency sonar-induced acoustic fields inside beaked whales and other marine mammals, as well as to evaluate effects of alternate signals. Another high-level goal is to collect high-resolution morphometric and physicalproperty data on beaked whales for use in the model. It is hoped that the availability of such a system together with high-quality data will give researchers insight into the physical nature of sonar interactions with beaked whales. | |
| Advanced Coupled Atmosphere-wave-ocean Modeling for Improving Tropical Cyclone Prediction Models The goals are to understand the physical processes that control the air-sea interaction and their impacts on rapid intensity changes in tropical cyclones (TCs) and to develop a physically based and computationally efficient coupling at the air-sea interface for use in a multi-model system that can transition to the next generation of research and operational coupled atmosphere-wave-oceanland models. | |
| Development and Deployment of a Modular, Autonomous In-situ Underwater Stable Isotope Analyzer The long term goal of this project is the development of a reliable and robust submersible instrument capable of in situ carbon stable isotope measurements of dissolved methane and carbon dioxide. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to determine how simulations and forecasts of currents and water properties in the coastal ocean, and the scientific understanding obtained from them, are influenced by the initial and boundary conditions provided to nested coastal ocean models. | |
| Developing the Next Generation Marine Mammal Information Center for Integrated Ocean Observing: OBIS-SEAMAP 2.0 Our ability to mitigate adverse interactions with marine mammals and other protected marine species is dependent on direct access to high-quality data sets, ecological models and expert knowledge. The OBIS-SEAMAP program (http://seamap.env.duke.edu) is designed specifically to make such information available to the research, education and management communities. Over the past four years, OBIS-SEAMAP has successfully developed a multi-function information system to provide critical data to scientists, managers and educators under the NOPP program. | |
| Developing ChemFinTM, a Miniature Biogeochemical Sensor Payload for Gliders, Profilers, and other AUVs The first goal of this project involves the further development and transition of ChemFINTM, a prototype autonomous profiling sensor for chemicals and biomolecules, into a commercial product that can be readily deployed on fixed or mobile ocean observation platforms such as coastal gliders, profiling moorings, and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The second goal of this project is to integrate a flow immunosensor technology, developed by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, into ChemFIN for the detection of biomolecules of interest, such as specific biotoxins (i.e saxitoxin) that are released during harmful algal blooms (HABs). | |
| Modeling Wind Wave Evolution from Deep to Shallow Water Ocean waves are an important aspect of upper ocean dynamics, in particular on the shallow continental shelves and in coastal areas. The long-term objective of this work is to advance modeling capability in such shallow areas by improving model representations of nonlinear effects and dissipation. | |
| Development of an Integrated ISFET pH Sensor for High Pressure Applications in the Deep-sea The long-term goals of this project are to enable observations of pH in the ocean using sensors deployed on autonomous platforms. These systems will enable robust, basin-scale observations of changing pH driven by natural and anthropogenic processes. | |
| Nonlinear and Dissipation Characteristics of Ocean Surface Waves in Estuarine Environments The overall goal of this work is the development of computational modules for the dissipation of surface wave energy due to expanses of bottom mud and marshland vegetation. The computational modules would represent both the dissipative effects on the surface waves and the effects of dissipation on other processes of wave transformation and evolution, with particular attention paid to the nonlinear energy exchange among wave frequencies. | |
| Climate Change and Baleen Whale Trophic Cascades in Greenland The primary goal of this study is to examine and contrast the foraging strategies of two baleen whale species in West Greenland. We use a multidisciplinary approach by combining observations of movements, foraging ecology and phenology collected by satellite and archival telemetry with intensive and localized in situ sampling of ocean conditions and prey availability. These baseline trophic relationships are quantified using spatial and bioenergetic models. | |
| Variability and Forcing Mechanisms of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation To understand processes associated with intra-seasonal to decadal variability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the relation to surface forcing. | |
| A NOPP Partnership for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): Focused Analysis of Satellite Data Sets The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is a major component of the global thermohaline circulation and is generally considered to be driven by the deepwater formation at high latitudes, specifically the Labrador Sea and the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas. The rates of deepwater formation are known to exhibit significant variations on seasonal and decadal time scales, and are believed to be sensitive to a changing climate. Variations in the strength of AMOC will have a signficant impact on the compensating surface flow, which facilitates the northward heat transport in the upper Atlantic Ocean, and consequently a significant impact on weather and climate in the area. Our goal is to incorporate satellite data sets into the study of AMOC. | |
| Data Assimilation and Predictability Studies for Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts This project aims to understand and improve the forecast of Tropical Cyclone (TC) lifecycle evolution and intensity, focusing on both large-scale environment and mesoscale phenomena in the TC system, which are major components responsible for intensity change. Two major challenges in TC intensity forecasting are the general lack of observations in the vicinity of TCs and the adaptive representation of the forecast error covariance. | |
| Plankton Analysis by Automated Submersible Imaging Flow Cytometry: Transforming a Specialized Research Instrument into a Broadly Accessible Tool and Extending its Target Size Range Detailed knowledge of the composition and characteristics of the particles suspended in seawater is crucial to an understanding of the biology, optics and geochemistry of the oceans. The composition and size distribution of the phytoplankton community, for example, help determine the flow of carbon and nutrients through an ecosystem and can be important indicators of how coastal environments respond to anthropogenic disturbances such as nutrient loading and pollution. Our goal is to provide researchers with instruments to continuously monitor phytoplankton community structure and investigate questions about the world's ocean ecosystems. | |
| Development of an Autonomous Ammonium Flurescence Sensor (AAFS) with a View Towards In-situ Application The goal is to develop a portable autonomous ammonium sensor. Such a sensor could be deployed for periods of up to a month aboard ships, upon moorings or drifting buoys or used as a component in lowered or towed oceanographic instrument packages for vertical profiling. | |
| TSA - A Two Scale Approximation for Wind-generated Ocean Surface Waves The goal is to provide an accurate, efficient, computational model (two-scale approximation, TSA) for the 4-wave interactions, in operational wave forecast models, suitable for global, basin and coastal scale applications, and able to transition seamlessly from deep to shallow water. | |
| Integration of an Emerging Highly Sensitive Optical CO2 Sensor for Ocean Monitoring on an Existing Data Acquistion System SeaKeeper 1000 The goal is to develop a high-performance pCO2 sensor that is affordable enough to be deployed in geat numbers to autonomously monitor the overall patterns of CO2 emissions and ocean acidification. | |
| Initialization, Prediction and Diagnosis of the Rapid Intensification of Tropical Cyclones Using the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, ACCESS The goal is to to develop and apply ACCESS-based numerical systems to perform nested, high-resolution data assimilation, initialization and forecast experiments for rapid and slow intensification events. These outcomes will be used to investigate assimilation, prediction and dynamics of environmental influences and internal structure change during rapid intensification events. | |
| Autonomous Measurements of an Oceanic Dissolved Nitrate from Commercially Available Profiling Floats Equipped with ISUS The goal of this work is to design, build, and produce a commercially available version of the In Situ Ultraviolet Spectrometer (ISUS) suitable for commercially-built profiling floats. Moored versions of ISUS already exist, and a profiling float version has been built and deployed, with excellent and exciting results. However, fabrication of the sensor and integration with the float have been to date difficult from an engineering perspective, and as a result possible by only a very few technical groups. The goal of this work is to simplify the design so that a commercial version of the float/ISUS can be produced and ultimately be widely used in the physical and biogeochemical oceanographic communities. The partnership involved here collectively has the skills to meet this goal. | |
| Evaluating Potential Effects of Satellite Tagging in Large Whales: A Case Study with Gulf of Maine Humpback Whales This project is a study of satellite tag retention and health impacts among Gulf of Maine humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae). Its overall goal is to better understand short- and medium-term physical and physiological effects of tagging with type 1 tags and to investigate the processes involved in tag rejection, possible tag failure and tag loss. This work is expected to inform future tag design and deployment. | |
| The Argo Project: Global Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability Phase 4 of US Argo is a follow-on 5-year project (7/06 � 6/11) aimed at improving and sustaining the US component of Argo. Float deployment rates should average around 400 per year. Objectives are to sustain the array of 1500 active US Argo floats; to further improve the spatial distribution of floats through targeted deployments; to further increase the mean lifetime of floats beyond 4 years; to continue to improve and operate the near-real time and delayed-mode data systems consistent with international agreements; and to provide substantial leadership and coordination roles for international Argo. | |
| Improving Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasting with Theoretically-based Statistical Models The goal of this research is to improve tropical cyclone intensity prediction through a theoretical study of the hurricane inner core (i.e., within 100-km), the role of ocean structure on hurricane intensity, and the incorporation of those results in a simplified intensity prediction system. The intensity prediction system will be tested in an operational framework in the western North Pacific and provided to the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) for evaluation. | |
| A Submersible Holographic Camera for the Undistirbed Characterization of Optically Relevant Particles in Water (HOLOCAM) The long-term goal is to develop novel oceanographic instrumentation to address fundamental questions in ocean optics. The primary goal of this project is to develop a holographic instrument capable of imaging and characterizing natural (i.e. undisturbed) particle fields in the ocean. The long-term science goal is to understand the link between suspended particles and the bulk scattering properties of natural waters. | |
| DECAF - Density Estimation for Cetaceans from Passive Acoustic Fixed sensors Our primary long-term goal is to develop and test methods for estimating cetacean density based on detecting the sounds cetaceans make underwater, using fixed hydrophones. There are many potential configurations of such devices, so an important second goal (not addressed in this work) is to determine which configurations are best for each of a common suite of monitoring scenarios. | |
| Augmentation of Early Intensity Forecasting in Tropical Cyclones This project will develop an objective and automatic intensity estimator of Tropical Cyclones (TCs) based on satellite infrared (IR) imagery. The proposed methodology analyzes the TC�s shape or pattern to perform the intensity estimates, which will be available every 30 minutes (or depending on image acquisition availability) for the Atlantic, Eastern North Pacific and Western North Pacific basins. We are investigating the underlying atmospheric dynamics by using mesoscale modeling and comparing the modeled storms to the measured signatures. | |
| Achieving Superior Tropical Cyclone Intensity Forecasts by Improving the Assimilation of High-Resolution Satellite Data into Mesoscale Prediction Models The ultimate goal of this project is the development and refinement of a capability to supplement the contemporary atmospheric observation network with optimal configurations and assimilation of advanced satellite-derived observations, to improve high-resolution operational analyses and intensity forecasts of TCs. | |
| Atlantic MOC Observing System Studies Using Adjoint Models The long-term goal is to understand, with a comprehensive data set and a state-of-the-art ocean model, the nature of the North Atlantic ocean circulation, with a particular emphasis on its long term variability and climate consequences. | |
Fiscal Year 2009 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Toward a Predictive Model of Arctic Coastal Retreat in a Warming Climate, Beaufort Sea, Alaska The long-term goal of this project is to understand the environmental drivers of extremely rapid coastal erosion in the Arctic, so that we can begin to predict how present and future climate change might influence coastal evolution. | |
| Episodic Upwelling of Zooplankton within a Bowhead Whale Feeding Area near Barrow, AK The long term goals are to understand (1) the biological-physical oceanographic characteristics and mechanisms on the shelf near Barrow, AK that together produce a favorable feeding environment for the bowhead whale there and (2) the potential impact of climate change, particularly the ongoing reduction in sea ice and variability in Pacific water presence near Barrow, on this feeding environment. | |
| Long-term in situ chemical sensors for monitoring nutrients: phosphate sensor commercialization and ammonium sensor development The long-term goals of this project are to 1) transition the CYCLE-Phosphate sensor from a prototype to a fully functional commercial product to enable sustained observations of phosphate concentration for detailed investigations of biogeochemical variability in open ocean and coastal environments, and 2) develop an in situ ammonium sensing capability along with the phosphate sensor, thereby allowing comprehensive research to be conducted on the impacts and controls of nutrient cycling in coastal and nearshore ecosystems. | |
| Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico The long-term goals of this study are to add to the understanding of the oceanography and ecology of the deep-sea with emphasis on cold seep communities and hard bottom communities on the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental slope. | |
| Deepwater Program: Exploration and Research of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Natural and Artificial Hard Bottom Habitats with Emphasis on Coral Communities: Reefs, Rigs and Wrecks A primary goal of this study is to obtain a robust predictive capability for the occurrence of rich cnidarian (primarily scleractinian coral) hard ground communities in the deep Gulf of Mexico. | |
| An Ocean Observing System for Large-Scale Monitoring and Mapping of Noise Throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary The project goals are to map the low-frequency (<1000 Hz) ocean noise budget throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) ecosystem, identify and quantify the contributing sources of anthropogenic sounds within that ecosystem, and determine whether or not such noises have the potential to impact endangered marine mammals and fishes that use the Sanctuary. | |
| An Autonomous Indicator-based pH Sensor for oceanographic Research and Monitoring This research uses the NOPP funding to achieve these objectives: • implement design improvements established during redesign of the SAMI-CO2including the optical detection system, control and data acquisition electronics, fluidics, and user software. • redesign the features that are specific to the SAMI-pH, focusing on optimizing the mixing protocol, power consumption, ease of troubleshooting, and expanding deployment versatility. • establish rigorous manufacturing quality control criteria to verify absorbance and pH precision and accuracy prior to shipment. • implement in situ data validation using pH certified reference materials (CRMs) made by Andrew Dickson's laboratory as part of this proposal. • commercialize the sensor through Sunburst Sensors, LLC. | |
| Mid-Frequency Sonar Interactions with Beaked Whales The top-level goal of this project is to build an interactive online modeling and visualization system, called the Virtual Beaked Whale. This will enable users to predict mid-frequency sonar-induced acoustic fields inside beaked whales and other marine mammals, as well as to evaluate effects of alternate signals. Another high-level goal is to collect high-resolution morphometric and physicalproperty data on beaked whales for use in the model. It is hoped that the availability of such a system together with high-quality data will give researchers insight into the physical nature of sonar interactions with beaked whales. | |
| Development and deployment of a modular, autonomous in situ underwater stable isotope analyzer The long term goal of this project is the development of a reliable and robust submersible instrument capable of in situ carbon stable isotope measurements of dissolved methane and carbon dioxide. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to determine how simulations and forecasts of currents and water properties in the coastal ocean, and the scientific understanding obtained from them, are influenced by the initial and boundary conditions provided to nested coastal ocean models. | |
| Developing the Next Generation Marine Mammal Information Center for Integrated Ocean Observing: OBIS-SEAMAP 2.0 Our ability to mitigate adverse interactions with marine mammals and other protected marine species is dependent on direct access to high-quality data sets, ecological models and expert knowledge. The OBIS-SEAMAP program (http://seamap.env.duke.edu) is designed specifically to make such information available to the research, education and management communities. Over the past four years, OBIS-SEAMAP has successfully developed a multi-function information system to provide critical data to scientists, managers and educators under the NOPP program. | |
| Developing ChemFinTM, a Miniature Biogeochemical Sensor Payload for Gliders, Profilers, and other AUVs The first goal of this project involves the further development and transition of ChemFINTM, a prototype autonomous profiling sensor for chemicals and biomolecules, into a commercial product that can be readily deployed on fixed or mobile ocean observation platforms such as coastal gliders, profiling moorings, and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The second goal of this project is to integrate a flow immunosensor technology, developed by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, into ChemFIN for the detection of biomolecules of interest, such as specific biotoxins (i.e saxitoxin) that are released during harmful algal blooms (HABs). | |
| Acoustic Detection, Behavior, and Habitat Use of Deep-Diving Odontocetes Passive acoustic monitoring is a key enabling technology in mitigating the effects of Naval activities on sound-sensitive cetaceans. The goals of this project are to obtain and disseminate critical information needed for the design of acoustic monitoring systems. | |
| Climate Change and Baleen Whale Trophic Cascades in Greenland The primary goal of this study is to examine and contrast the foraging strategies of two baleen whale species in West Greenland. We use a multidisciplinary approach by combining observations of movements, foraging ecology and phenology collected by satellite and archival telemetry with intensive and localized in situ sampling of ocean conditions and prey availability. These baseline trophic relationships are quantified using spatial and bioenergetic models. | |
| Variability and Forcing Mechanisms of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation To understand processes associated with intra-seasonal to decadal variability of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) and the relation to surface forcing. | |
| The Influence of Oceanographic and Biological Processes on the Distribution of Cetaceans on the West Florida Shelf: A Synoptic Study Based on Underwater and Space-Based Remote Sensing Studies employing visual surveys for cetaceans typically suffer from high levels of spatial and temporal aliasing due to limitations in the number of vessels and the amount of survey time. We will use autonomous acoustic data recorders to monitor cetaceans over a large spatial and temporal scale, overcoming some of the limitations of studies based on visual surveys alone. These data will be complemented by visual survey data within the acoustic survey area during recorder deployment and retrieval. With in-situ and satellite remote sensing oceanographic data, relationships between the distribution of cetaceans and such factors as sea surface temperature, chlorophyll levels and background noise levels will be investigated on appropriate temporal and spatial scales. Results from existing numerical circulation models of the Gulf of Mexico will help understand underlying oceanographic processes. | |
| A Comprehensive Modeling Approach Towards Understanding and Prediction of the Alaskan Coastal System Response to Changes in an Ice-diminished Arctic Our research combines state-of-the-art regional modeling of sea ice, ocean, atmosphere and ecosystem to provide a system approach to advance the knowledge and predictive capability of the diverse impacts of changing sea ice cover on the bio-physical marine environment of coastal Alaska and over the larger region of the western Arctic Ocean. The focus of this project on seasonally ice-free Alaskan coasts and shelves is in direct support of the 'Coastal Effects of a Diminished-ice Arctic Ocean' and littoral studies of interest to the U.S. Navy. | |
| A NOPP Partnership for Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC): Focused Analysis of Satellite Data Sets The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), is a major component of the global thermohaline circulation and is generally considered to be driven by the deepwater formation at high latitudes, specifically the Labrador Sea and the Greenland-Iceland-Norwegian Seas. The rates of deepwater formation are known to exhibit significant variations on seasonal and decadal time scales, and are believed to be sensitive to a changing climate. Variations in the strength of AMOC will have a signficant impact on the compensating surface flow, which facilitates the northward heat transport in the upper Atlantic Ocean, and consequently a significant impact on weather and climate in the area. Our goal is to incorporate satellite data sets into the study of AMOC. | |
| Plankton Analysis by Automated Submersible Imaging Flow Cytometry: Transforming a Specialized Research Instrument into a Broadly Accessible Tool and Extending its Target Size Range Detailed knowledge of the composition and characteristics of the particles suspended in seawater is crucial to an understanding of the biology, optics and geochemistry of the oceans. The composition and size distribution of the phytoplankton community, for example, help determine the flow of carbon and nutrients through an ecosystem and can be important indicators of how coastal environments respond to anthropogenic disturbances such as nutrient loading and pollution. Our goal is to provide researchers with instruments to continuously monitor phytoplankton community structure and investigate questions about the world's ocean ecosystems. | |
| Autonomous Measurements of an Oceanic Dissolved Nitrate from Commercially Available Profiling Floats Equipped with ISUS The goal of this work is to design, build, and produce a commercially available version of the In Situ Ultraviolet Spectrometer (ISUS) suitable for commercially-built profiling floats. Moored versions of ISUS already exist, and a profiling float version has been built and deployed, with excellent and exciting results. However, fabrication of the sensor and integration with the float have been to date difficult from an engineering perspective, and as a result possible by only a very few technical groups. The goal of this work is to simplify the design so that a commercial version of the float/ISUS can be produced and ultimately be widely used in the physical and biogeochemical oceanographic communities. The partnership involved here collectively has the skills to meet this goal. | |
| The Argo Project: Global Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability Phase 4 of US Argo is a follow-on 5-year project (7/06 � 6/11) aimed at improving and sustaining the US component of Argo. Float deployment rates should average around 400 per year. Objectives are to sustain the array of 1500 active US Argo floats; to further improve the spatial distribution of floats through targeted deployments; to further increase the mean lifetime of floats beyond 4 years; to continue to improve and operate the near-real time and delayed-mode data systems consistent with international agreements; and to provide substantial leadership and coordination roles for international Argo. | |
| DECAF - Density Estimation for Cetaceans from Passive Acoustic Fixed sensors Our primary long-term goal is to develop and test methods for estimating cetacean density based on detecting the sounds cetaceans make underwater, using fixed hydrophones. There are many potential configurations of such devices, so an important second goal (not addressed in this work) is to determine which configurations are best for each of a common suite of monitoring scenarios. | |
| NOPP: Circulation, Cross-Shelf Exchange, Sea Ice, and Marine Mammal Habitats on the Alaska Beaufort Sea Shelf Our long-term goals are to understand how the physical oceanography, sea-ice dynamics, and marine mammal utilization of arctic shelves will change in response to a diminishing ice cover. We thus seek to understand better the wind-forced response of the shelf and shelfbreak and the cross-shelf exchange of mass, materials, and momentum. | |
| Atlantic MOC Observing System Studies Using Adjoint Models The long-term goal is to understand, with a comprehensive data set and a state-of-the-art ocean model, the nature of the North Atlantic ocean circulation, with a particular emphasis on its long term variability and climate consequences. | |
Fiscal Year 2008 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Episodic Upwelling of Zooplankton within a Bowhead Whale Feeding Area near Barrow, AK The long term goals are to understand (1) the biological-physical oceanographic characteristics and mechanisms on the shelf near Barrow, AK that together produce a favorable feeding environment for the bowhead whale there and (2) the potential impact of climate change, particularly the ongoing reduction in sea ice and variability in Pacific water presence near Barrow, on this feeding environment. | |
| Long-term in situ chemical sensors for monitoring nutrients: phosphate sensor commercialization and ammonium sensor development The long-term goals of this project are to 1) transition the CYCLE-Phosphate sensor from a prototype to a fully functional commercial product to enable sustained observations of phosphate concentration for detailed investigations of biogeochemical variability in open ocean and coastal environments, and 2) develop an in situ ammonium sensing capability along with the phosphate sensor, thereby allowing comprehensive research to be conducted on the impacts and controls of nutrient cycling in coastal and nearshore ecosystems. | |
| Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico The long-term goals of this study are to add to the understanding of the oceanography and ecology of the deep-sea with emphasis on cold seep communities and hard bottom communities on the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental slope. | |
| Deepwater Program: Exploration and Research of Northern Gulf of Mexico Deepwater Natural and Artificial Hard Bottom Habitats with Emphasis on Coral Communities: Reefs, Rigs and Wrecks A primary goal of this study is to obtain a robust predictive capability for the occurrence of rich cnidarian (primarily scleractinian coral) hard ground communities in the deep Gulf of Mexico. | |
| An Ocean Observing System for Large-Scale Monitoring and Mapping of Noise Throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary The project goals are to map the low-frequency (<1000 Hz) ocean noise budget throughout the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary (SBNMS) ecosystem, identify and quantify the contributing sources of anthropogenic sounds within that ecosystem, and determine whether or not such noises have the potential to impact endangered marine mammals and fishes that use the Sanctuary. | |
| Commercialization of autonomous sensor systems for quantifying pCO2 and total inorganic carbon This research, funded under 2004's NOPP Topic 4B "Sensors for Sustained, Autonomous Measurement of Chemical or Biological Parameters in the Ocean" uses the NOPP funding to promote commercialization of the SAMI-CO2, a sensor developed for autonomous measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in seawater. | |
| An autonomous indicator-based pH sensor for oceanographic research and monitoring This research uses the NOPP funding to achieve these objectives: • implement design improvements established during redesign of the SAMI-CO2including the optical detection system, control and data acquisition electronics, fluidics, and user software. • redesign the features that are specific to the SAMI-pH, focusing on optimizing the mixing protocol, power consumption, ease of troubleshooting, and expanding deployment versatility. • establish rigorous manufacturing quality control criteria to verify absorbance and pH precision and accuracy prior to shipment. • implement in situ data validation using pH certified reference materials (CRMs) made by Andrew Dickson's laboratory as part of this proposal. • commercialize the sensor through Sunburst Sensors, LLC. | |
| Mid-Frequency Sonar Interactions with Beaked Whales The top-level goal of this project is to build an interactive online modeling and visualization system, called the Virtual Beaked Whale. This will enable users to predict mid-frequency sonar-induced acoustic fields inside beaked whales and other marine mammals, as well as to evaluate effects of alternate signals. Another high-level goal is to collect high-resolution morphometric and physicalproperty data on beaked whales for use in the model. It is hoped that the availability of such a system together with high-quality data will give researchers insight into the physical nature of sonar interactions with beaked whales. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature (MISST) for GODAE The Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperatures (MISST) for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) project intends to produce an improved, high-resolution, global, near-real-time (NRT), sea surface temperature analysis through the combination of satellite observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors and to then demonstrate the impact of these improved sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction (NWP), and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. | |
| The Community Sediment Transport Modeling System The goal of the Community Sediment Transport Modeling System (CSTMS) is to produce an open-source model that couples hydrodynamics (circulation and waves), sediment transport, and morphodynamics. The model is intended to be used as both a research tool and for practical applications. | |
| Development and deployment of a modular, autonomous in situ underwater stable isotope analyzer The long term goal of this project is the development of a reliable and robust submersible instrument capable of in situ carbon stable isotope measurements of dissolved methane and carbon dioxide. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to determine how simulations and forecasts of currents and water properties in the coastal ocean, and the scientific understanding obtained from them, are influenced by the initial and boundary conditions provided to nested coastal ocean models. | |
| Developing the Next Generation Marine Mammal Information Center for Integrated Ocean Observing: OBIS-SEAMAP 2.0 Our ability to mitigate adverse interactions with marine mammals and other protected marine species is dependent on direct access to high-quality data sets, ecological models and expert knowledge. The OBIS-SEAMAP program (http://seamap.env.duke.edu) is designed specifically to make such information available to the research, education and management communities. Over the past four years, OBIS-SEAMAP has successfully developed a multi-function information system to provide critical data to scientists, managers and educators under the NOPP program. | |
| Developing ChemFinTM, a Miniature Biogeochemical Sensor Payload for Gliders, Profilers, and other AUVs The first goal of this project involves the further development and transition of ChemFINTM, a prototype autonomous profiling sensor for chemicals and biomolecules, into a commercial product that can be readily deployed on fixed or mobile ocean observation platforms such as coastal gliders, profiling moorings, and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The second goal of this project is to integrate a flow immunosensor technology, developed by researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory, into ChemFIN for the detection of biomolecules of interest, such as specific biotoxins (i.e saxitoxin) that are released during harmful algal blooms (HABs). | |
| Transitioning Submersible Chemical Analyzer Technologies for Sustained, Autonomous Observations from Profiling Moorings, Gliders and other AUVs To transition existing prototype autonomous profiling nutrient analyzers into commercial products that can be readily deployed on autonomous profiling moorings, coastal gliders and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles and used for sustained, autonomous ocean observations of chemical distributions and variability. A series of issues have been identified that that need to be addressed to convert prototype nutrient analyzers into commercial units that can be widely used by the community for sustained and accurate, stable, autonomous operation in the ocean. These issues are; (1) a more compact size, (2) reduced reagent and power consumption, (3) enhanced biofouling suppression, (4) ease of use by non-chemists, and (5) documented performance when deployed on different platforms. | |
| Acoustic Detection, Behavior, and Habitat Use of Deep-Diving Odontocetes Passive acoustic monitoring is a key enabling technology in mitigating the effects of Naval activities on sound-sensitive cetaceans. The goals of this project are to obtain and disseminate critical information needed for the design of acoustic monitoring systems. | |
| The Influence of Oceanographic and Biological Processes on the Distribution of Cetaceans on the West Florida Shelf: A Synoptic Study Based on Underwater and Space-Based Remote Sensing Studies employing visual surveys for cetaceans typically suffer from high levels of spatial and temporal aliasing due to limitations in the number of vessels and the amount of survey time. We will use autonomous acoustic data recorders to monitor cetaceans over a large spatial and temporal scale, overcoming some of the limitations of studies based on visual surveys alone. These data will be complemented by visual survey data within the acoustic survey area during recorder deployment and retrieval. With in-situ and satellite remote sensing oceanographic data, relationships between the distribution of cetaceans and such factors as sea surface temperature, chlorophyll levels and background noise levels will be investigated on appropriate temporal and spatial scales. Results from existing numerical circulation models of the Gulf of Mexico will help understand underlying oceanographic processes. | |
| A Comprehensive Modeling Approach Towards Understanding and Prediction of the Alaskan Coastal System Response to Changes in an Ice-diminished Arctic Our research combines state-of-the-art regional modeling of sea ice, ocean, atmosphere and ecosystem to provide a system approach to advance the knowledge and predictive capability of the diverse impacts of changing sea ice cover on the bio-physical marine environment of coastal Alaska and over the larger region of the western Arctic Ocean. The focus of this project on seasonally ice-free Alaskan coasts and shelves is in direct support of the 'Coastal Effects of a Diminished-ice Arctic Ocean' and littoral studies of interest to the U.S. Navy. | |
| Plankton Analysis by Automated Submersible Imaging Flow Cytometry: Transforming a Specialized Research Instrument into a Broadly Accessible Tool and Extending its Target Size Range Detailed knowledge of the composition and characteristics of the particles suspended in seawater is crucial to an understanding of the biology, optics and geochemistry of the oceans. The composition and size distribution of the phytoplankton community, for example, help determine the flow of carbon and nutrients through an ecosystem and can be important indicators of how coastal environments respond to anthropogenic disturbances such as nutrient loading and pollution. Our goal is to provide researchers with instruments to continuously monitor phytoplankton community structure and investigate questions about the world's ocean ecosystems. | |
| The Argo Project: Global Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability As of November 1, 2007, the international Argo Project, including the US contribution, has met its goal of building a global array of 3000 active profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2001, 2002, Gould et al., 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. In order to maintain the Argo array, it is necessary to replace over 25% (800) instruments every year. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS). | |
| Understanding and Predicting Changes in the Workforce for Ocean Sciences, Technology, and Operations Our major long-term goals for this project are: 1. Develop improved assessment of the ocean science, technology, and operations (OSTO) workforce. 2. Anticipate future requirements for this workforce. 3. Identify educational processes needed to develop this workforce. | |
| DECAF - Density Estimation for Cetaceans from passive Acoustic Fixed sensors Our primary long-term goal is to develop and test methods for estimating cetacean density based on detecting the sounds cetaceans make underwater, using fixed hydrophones. There are many potential configurations of such devices, so an important second goal (not addressed in this work) is to determine which configurations are best for each of a common suite of monitoring scenarios. | |
| NOPP: Circulation, Cross-Shelf Exchange, Sea Ice, and Marine Mammal Habitats on the Alaska Beaufort Sea Shelf Our long-term goals are to understand how the physical oceanography, sea-ice dynamics, and marine mammal utilization of arctic shelves will change in response to a diminishing ice cover. We thus seek to understand better the wind-forced response of the shelf and shelfbreak and the cross-shelf exchange of mass, materials, and momentum. | |
| Toward a Predictive Model of Arctic Coastal Retreat in a Warming Climate, Beaufort Sea, Alaska The long-term goal of this project is to understand the environmental drivers of extremely rapid coastal erosion in the Arctic, so that we can begin to predict how present and future climate change might influence coastal evolution. | |
Fiscal Year 2007 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Novel Acoustic Techniques for Assessing Fish Schooling in the Context of an Operational Ocean Observatory Fish aggregation is important in terms of biology, fisheries, and measurement, quantitative analyses of gregarious movement behaviors remain relatively rare (Turchin 1989). Fish aggregation has most often been studied in easily accessed fish or fish easily maintained in the laboratory such as minnows and dace (see a review in Pitcher and Parrish 1993). Measurements of fish aggregations are often difficult, particularly in pelagic environments. Our goal is to develop new acoustic techniques that have the potential to serve as measurement tools to quantify this ubiquitous and important behavior. | |
| Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico The long term goals of this study are to add to the understanding of the oceanography and ecology of the deep-sea with emphasis on cold seep communities and hard bottom communities on the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental slope. Preliminary studies have shown that seep communities at the slope base are different from those on the upper slope, in much the same way that the normal background fauna differ. Compared to the upper-slope, there is limited understanding of seep and other hard bottom communities below 1,000 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. | |
| Development of a Mass Spectrometer for Deployment on Moorings and Cabled Observatories for Long-Term Unattended Observation of Low-Molecular Weight Chemicals in the Water Column The goals of this project are to address the need for advanced chemical sensing in the ocean environment through development of a new mass spectrometer for long-term unattended deployment. The TETHYS (TETHered Yearlong Spectrometer) mass spectrometer is based on Monitor Instruments' miniature cycloidal mass analyzer technology and oceanographic components developed by WHOI. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction with the Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) A broad partnership of institutions is collaborating in developing and demonstrating the performance and application of eddy-resolving, real-time global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). These systems will run efficiently on a variety of massively parallel computers and will include sophisticated, but relatively inexpensive, data assimilation techniques for assimiliation on satellite altimeter sea surface heigh (SSH) and sea surface temperature (SST) as well as in-situ temperature, salinity, and float displacement. | |
| A Novel Technique to Detect Epipelagic Fish Populations and Map their Habitat The ultimate goal of this project is to substantially improve our understanding of the relation between ecologically important key fish species (e.g. sardine and albacore) and the physical environment by collecting synoptic measurements with improved spatial and temporal resolution of observations. | |
| Understanding Apex Predator and Pelagic Fish Habitat Utilization in the California Current System by Integrating Animal Tracking with in situ Oceanographic Observations The long term goals of this program are to map the oceanic habitats used by top predators in the California Current System (CCS) and to describe the oceanographic features that define these hotspot regions. This has been done by examining both top down and bottom up processes, and predicting how climate variability impacts the distribution and utilization of oceanic habitats within the CCS. We are also developing methods that are required to integrate animal collected environmental data into existing oceanographic databases. | |
| Commercialization of autonomous sensor systems for quantifying pCO2 and total inorganic carbon This research, funded under 2004's NOPP Topic 4B "Sensors for Sustained, Autonomous Measurement of Chemical or Biological Parameters in the Ocean" uses the NOPP funding to promote commercialization of the SAMI-CO2, a sensor developed for autonomous measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in seawater. | |
| Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) The long term goal of this initiative is to develop a globally re-locatable, integrated system for real time observation, modeling, and data distribution for shelf, coastal sea, and estuarine waters. | |
| Assessing the Impact of GODAE Boundary Conditions on the Estimate and Prediction of the Monterey Bay and California Central Coast Circulation The practical demonstration of basin-scale ocean state estimation has been realized through the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) whose projects provide complete descriptions of the temperature, salinity, and velocity structure of the global ocean. The ocean circulation, temperature and salinity distributions of coastal regions are characterized by smaller scale processes typically not resolved by basin-scale estimates of the ocean structure. The overarching goal of this project is to assess the impact of the large-scale ocean structure (as produced by GODAE), when used in conjunction with satellite observations, on the numerical prediction of the coastal ocean environment. | |
| Mid-Frequency Sonar Interactions with Beaked Whales The top-level goal of this project is to build an interactive online modeling and visualization system, called the Virtual Beaked Whale, to enable users to predict mid-frequency sonar-induced acoustic fields inside beaked whales and other marine mammals. Another high-level goal is to acquire new high-resolution morphometric and physical-property data on beaked whales for use in the model. It is hoped that the availability of such a system together with high-quality data will give researchers insight into the nature of sonar interactions with beaked whales, ultimately to introduce objectivity into a public discussion that has been hampered by lack of a scientific approach. It is hoped further that the tool will prove useful in evaluating alternate sonar transmit signals that retain the required information content but with substantially reduced physical effects in beaked whales. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature (MISST) for GODAE The Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperatures (MISST) for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) project intends to produce an improved, high-resolution, global, near-real-time (NRT), sea surface temperature analysis through the combination of satellite observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors and to then demonstrate the impact of these improved sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. | |
| Community Sediment Transport Model The goal of this project is to produce an open-source model that couples hydrodynamics (circulation and waves), sediment transport, and morphodynamics. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to determine how simulations and forecasts of currents and water properties in the coastal ocean, and the scientific results obtained from them, are influenced by the initial and boundary conditions provided to nested coastal ocean models. | |
| Developing the Next Generation Marine Mammal Information Center for Integrated Ocean Observing: OBIS-SEAMAP 2.0 The central work-plan for this renewal is to conduct a strategic expansion of the OBIS-SEAMAP information system in depth, breadth, functionality and usage. The specific objectives we propose are directly targeted to support more robust analyses and management of marine mammal populations. In addition to maintaining the existing system on a growth trajectory, we plan to target five new specific focal areas: 1. Data gap analysis and prioritized expansion of the marine mammal geodatabase; 2. Inclusion of new data types (acoustics, photo-ID, 4D telemetry, model outputs and turtle nesting); 3. Expanded functionality with mapping, species profiles, metadata, and web services; 4. Seamless interoperability with IOOS/GEOSS ocean observing community; and 5. Development of new partnerships focusing on data and technology. | |
| Transitioning Submersible Chemical Analyzer Technologies for Sustained, Autonomous Observations from Profiling Moorings, Gliders and other AUVs To transition existing prototype autonomous profiling nutrient analyzers into commercial products that can be readily deployed on autonomous profiling moorings, coastal gliders and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles and used for sustained, autonomous ocean observations of chemical distributions and variability. A series of issues have been identified that that need to be addressed to convert prototype nutrient analyzers into commercial units that can be widely used by the community for sustained and accurate, stable, autonomous operation in the ocean. These issues are; (1) a more compact size, (2) reduced reagent and power consumption, (3) enhanced biofouling suppression, (4) ease of use by non-chemists, and (5) documented performance when deployed on different platforms. Our plan to address those issues involves using recent advances in micro-fluidics and optical detectors (new SubChem and WET Labs technologies) to reduce sample flow rates and volumes and thus reagent and power consumption; (2) extend the length of field deployments by periodically isolating sensitive components so that back-flushing and chemical techniques can be used to suppress bio-fouling, (3) increase the ease of use by simplifying operation, pre-packaging reagents and outputting the data in engineering units, and (4) thoroughly documenting the performance by conducting demonstration experiments at field sites that have strong vertical and horizontal nutrient gradients and episodic phytoplankton blooms. We intend to achieve these goals through this NOPP partnership. The industry partners will take the lead in developing the commercial versions of the nutrient analyzers while the university and government partners will provide guidance defining the initial performance criteria for the nutrient analyzers and in providing the deployment platforms and conducting the field testing and demonstration experiments. | |
| Development of Mid-Frequency Multibeam Sonar for Fisheries Applications The long-term goal of this program is to investigate the utility of mid-frequency (1-10 kHz) acoustics to detect, enumerate, and identify pelagic fish distributions. Our strategy integrates biological and physical model predictions with field measurements and will combine results in computer visualizations and animations. Efforts are directed in three primary areas: sound propagation modeling, fish backscatter modeling, and mid-frequency multibeam development and field measurements | |
| Acoustic Detection, Behavior, and Habitat Use of Deep-Diving Odontocetes Passive acoustic monitoring is a key enabling technology in mitigating the effects of Naval activities on sound-sensitive cetaceans. The goals of this project are to obtain and disseminate critical information needed for the design of acoustic monitoring systems. | |
| Continuous Monitoring of Fish Population and Behavior by Instantaneous Continental-Shelf-Scale Imaging with Ocean-Waveguide Acoustics The long-term goals of this program are to (1) instantaneously detect, image and spatially chart fish populations over continental-shelf scales, and (2) continuously monitor the areal densities and behavior of these fish populations over time using a novel audible frequency acoustic system (300-5000Hz) referred to as Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS). This new method is being applied to explore the abundance, temporal and spatial distributions and behavior of fish populations in the Gulf of Maine on and near Georges Bank, a marine ecosystem being studied in the Census of Marine Life program. OAWRS is a valuable conservation tool for rapid imaging and enumeration of large scale fish populations over thousands of square kilometers to effectively monitor and manage the national fish stock | |
| The Influence of Oceanographic and Biological Processes on the Distribution of Cetaceans on the West Florida Shelf: A Synoptic Study Based on Underwater and Space-Based Remote Sensing Studies employing visual surveys for cetaceans typically suffer from high levels of spatial and temporal aliasing due to limitations in the number of vessels and the amount of survey time. We will use autonomous acoustic data recorders to monitor cetaceans over a large spatial and temporal scale, overcoming some of the limitations of studies based on visual surveys alone. These data will be complemented by visual survey data within the acoustic survey area during recorder deployment and retrieval. With in-situ and satellite remote sensing oceanographic data, relationships between the distribution of cetaceans and such factors as sea surface temperature, chlorophyll levels and background noise levels will be investigated on appropriate temporal and spatial scales. Results from existing numerical circulation models of the Gulf of Mexico will help understand underlying oceanographic processes. | |
| A Comprehensive Modeling Approach Towards Understanding and Prediction of the Alaskan Coastal System Response to Changes in an Ice-diminished Arctic Our research combines state-of-the-art regional modeling of sea ice, ocean, atmosphere and ecosystem to provide a system approach to advance the knowledge and predictive capability of the diverse impacts of changing sea ice cover on the bio-physical marine environment of coastal Alaska and over the larger region of the western Arctic Ocean. The focus of this project on seasonally ice-free Alaskan coasts and shelves is in direct support of the 'Coastal Effects of a Diminished-ice Arctic Ocean' and littoral studies of interest to the U.S. Navy. Given the continued warming and summer sea ice cover decrease in the Arctic during the past decades, this research will have broader and long-term impacts by facilitating studies of the potential increased exploration of natural resources along the seasonally ice-free northern Alaskan coasts and shelves and of the use of northern sea routes from the Pacific Ocean to Europe. Such activities will change the strategic importance of the entire pan-Arctic region. The research will allow a better understanding and planning of current and future operational needs in support of the continued US commercial and tactical interests in the region. | |
| The Argo Project Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 5 of the 5-year project, and builds on progress made by previous awards (Phases 1 and 2) for pilot float arrays and data system development. By the middle of 2007, Argo will have deployed a global array of 3000 profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2002, Gould, 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. The Argo array will provide unprecedented views of the evolving physical state of the ocean. It will reveal the physical processes that balance the large-scale heat and freshwater budgets of the ocean and will provide a crucial dataset for initialization of and assimilation in seasonal-to-decadal forecast models. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System. | |
| Boundary Conditions, Data Assimilation, and Predictability in Coastal Ocean Models The long-terms goals of this research are to improve our ability to understand and predict environmental conditions in the coastal ocean. | |
| Understanding and Predicting Changes in the Ocean Science, Technology and Operations Workforce The goals of this workforce study are to (1) produce a more complete description of the present state of the ocean science, technology, and operations (OSTO) workforce; (2) anticipate future developments and predict the evolution of this workforce; and (3) characterize the educational programs that will be needed to respond to expected workforce changes. Initially, the project will focus on the workforce required to support current and planned ocean observing systems (OOS) efforts; it will then expand to include related sectors of the economy such as telecommunications, hydrographic surveying, the oil and gas industry and others. | |
| DECAF - Density Estimation for Cetaceans from passive Acoustic Fixed sensors Our primary long-term goal is to develop and test methods for estimating cetacean density based on detecting the sounds cetaceans make underwater, using fixed hydrophones. There are many potential configurations of such devices, so if it does prove possible to estimate density reliably using passive acoustics, an important second goal (not addressed in this work) is to determine which configurations is best for a each of a common suite of monitoring scenarios. | |
| High-level Data Fusion Software for SHOALS-1000TH Optech International and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) have partnered to develop and apply data fusion techniques to combine active and passive remote sensing data for mapping shallow-water and coastal environments. During this reporting period we have: (1) established a collaboration between industry and academia focused on the use of bathymetric lidar and simultaneous passive spectral data for shoreline mapping and characterization; (2) produced a novel paradigm which can be used to formally compare and contrast different strategies for data fusion; (3) developed and implemented 3 high-level data fusion algorithms; (4) disseminated datasets to several other researchers; and (5) worked to understand regional-scale coastal environmental processes through the use of these data. | |
| NOPP: Circulation, Cross-Shelf Exchange, Sea Ice, and Marine Mammal Habitats on the Alaska Beaufort Sea Shelf Our long-term goal is to understand how the circulation, stratification, sea-ice dynamics, and marine mammal utilization of arctic shelves will change in response to a diminishing ice cover. We thus seek to understand better the wind-forced response of the shelf and the shelfbreak, and the cross-shelf exchange of mass, materials, and momentum. These responses will likely affect the use of arctic shelves by marine mammals. Our study is applying a variety of recently developed technologies in a synergistic manner. These include passive acoustic recorders, moored profiling temperature/salinity sensors, autonomous underwater vehicles, shore-based current mapping radars, and geophysical processing tools to determine ice displacement and deformation. An additional long-term goal is to demonstrate the applicability of these technologies and their synergistic usage to other arctic shelves. | |
| Toward a Predictive Model of Arctic Coastal Retreat in a Warming Climate, Beaufort Sea, Alaska The long-term goal of this project is to build a set of process-based models of Arctic coastal evolution that will aid in prediction of future landscape and nearshore bathymetric change. Our study is focused on the Beaufort Sea coast within the National Petroleum Reserve - Alaska (NPR-A), approximately halfway between Barrow and Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Our project will help us to identify sites along the Beaufort Sea coast that are at particular risk of becoming eroded in the near future, and to predict future patterns of coastal change as a function of projected changes in sea surface temperature, sea ice conditions, and changes in land surface temperatures. Our approach takes a step beyond the empirical analyses that have characterized past studies of Arctic coastal change by focusing on the development of models fed by new environmental data and retrospective analyses of existing data. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Sustained Global Ocean State Estimation for Scientific and Practical Application This consortium project is attempting to use all existing ocean observations, including satellite data, for the purpose of understanding and ultimately predicting, the ocean on climate time-scales. To this end it is advancing ocean "state estimation" as a practical, quasi-operational tool, for studying the ocean circulation and its influence on societal problems such as climate change, sea level rise, and biological impacts. Observing the ocean is difficult owing to its turbulent nature and very large range of energetic spatial scales. This project is establishing the means by which a quantitative description of the global ocean is and will be routinely and continuously available. The methodology employs state-of-the-art general circulation models, statistical estimation techniques, and the complete range of available oceanic observations. The effort includes further demonstration of the practical utility of ocean observing systems through their use in important scientific goals. | |
Fiscal Year 2006 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Novel Acoustic Techniques for Assessing Fish Schooling in the Context of an Operational Ocean Observatory Fish aggregation is important in terms of biology, fisheries, and measurement, quantitative analyses of gregarious movement behaviors remain relatively rare (Turchin 1989). Fish aggregation has most often been studied in easily accessed fish or fish easily maintained in the laboratory such as minnows and dace (see a review in Pitcher and Parrish 1993). Measurements of fish aggregations are often difficult, particularly in pelagic environments. Our goal is to develop new acoustic techniques that have the potential to serve as measurement tools to quantify this ubiquitous and important behavior. | |
| Accelerating Electronic Tag Development for tracking Free-Ranging Marine Animals At Sea The objective of this proposal is to complete the development, testing, and deployment of archival and satellite tags for the Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) pilot program of the Census of Marine Life. Efforts have centered both on improving existing technologies and on developing new tools that are now allowing us to address more complex questions about the animals and their environment. First, electronic tags are providing TOPP with the tools necessary to address fundamental questions in biological oceanography concerning the distribution and critical habitats of pelagic organisms. This information is being used to describe the movements and behaviors of marine vertebrates and large squid in the North Pacific and to identify hotspots and migratory corridors. Second, with the new tags developed under this effort we are now using the tag-bearing animals as autonomous ocean profilers and we are providing oceanographic data to the growing global databases. The vertical and horizontal movements of tagged marine vertebrates allow sampling of more remote, traditionally under sampled areas, as well as providing unprecedented temporal and spatial coverage of the North Pacific. Not only are these data of great value to oceanographers but when the biological and physical data are merged, we can obtain an "organism-eye" view of how marine animals from several trophic levels use distinct oceanic regions. | |
| An Annotated and Federated Digital Library of Marine Animal Sounds The Macaulay Library is the world's largest archive of animal sounds and has been selected by the Office of Naval Research as a major repository for the deposition, digital archival, review, and retrieval of the many recordings of marine animals made over the last half-century. Archived marine recordings pose challenging retrieval problems given the typically long intervals of silence between animal sounds and the multiplicity of species detectable in any given recording. One goal of this project is to design software that will permit remote experts to annotate the content of long recordings archived at the Macaulay Library through their web browsers. Annotations will permit subsequent searches of the archive database to retrieve not only suitable recordings, but also those parts of a recording meeting the search criteria. The project also seeks to define and extract a set of acoustic features from all archived marine recordings that can be used in subsequent search and retrieval tasks. Both capabilities will be unique to this sound collection, and will greatly enhance the accessibility and the utility of the archive to scientists, students, educators, military personnel, and the media. | |
| Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico The long-term goals of this study are to add to the understanding of the oceanography and ecology of the deep-sea with emphasis on cold seep communities and hard bottom communities on the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental slope. Preliminary studies have shown that seep communities at the slope base are different from those on the upper slope, in much the same way that the normal background fauna differ. Compared to the upper-slope, there is limited understanding of seep and other hard bottom communities below 1,000 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. TDI-Brooks' project team will meet MMS' information needs concerning the location and functioning of seep communities deeper than 1,000 meters. | |
| Development of a Mass Spectrometer for Deployment on Moorings and Cabled Observatories for Long-Term Unattended Observation of Low-Molecular Weight Chemicals in the Water Column The goals of this project are to address the need for advanced chemical sensing in the ocean environment through development of a new mass spectrometer for long-term unattended deployment. The mass spectrometer is based on Monitor Instruments' miniature cycloidal mass analyzer technology and oceanographic components developed by WHOI. Testing and trial deployments will be carried out by WHOI at its Deep Submergence Laboratory and Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO). Monitor Instruments will carry out commercialization of this instrument, which will be known as TETHYS (TETHered Yearlong Spectrometer). | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction With the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) A broad partnership of institutions is collaborating in developing and demonstrating the performance and application of eddy-resolving, real-time global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). These systems will be transitioned for operational use by the U.S. Navy at both the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO), Stennis Space Center, MS, and the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), Monterey, CA, and by NOAA at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Washington, D.C. The systems will run efficiently on a variety of massively parallel computers and will include sophisticated, but relatively inexpensive, data assimilation techniques for assimilation of satellite altimeter sea surface height (SSH) and sea surface temperature (SST) as well as in-situ temperature, salinity, and float displacement. The project partnership represents a truly broad spectrum of the oceanographic community, bringing together academia, federal agencies, and industry/commercial entities, spanning modeling, data assimilation, data management and serving, observational capabilities, and application of HYCOM prediction system outputs. The institutions participating in this partnership have long histories of supporting and carrying out a wide range of oceanographic and ocean prediction-related research and data management. All institutions are committed to validating an operational hybrid-coordinate ocean model that combines the strengths of the vertical coordinates used in the present generation of ocean models by placing them where they perform best. This collaborative partnership provides an opportunity to leverage and accelerate the efforts of existing and planned projects, in order to produce a higher quality product that will collectively better serve a wider range of users than would the individual projects. | |
| A Novel Technique to Detect Epipelagic Fish Populations and Map their Habitat The ultimate goal of this project is to substantially improve our understanding of the relation between ecologically important key fish species (e.g. sardine and albacore) and the physical environment by collecting synoptic measurements with improved spatial and temporal resolution of observations. | |
| Acoustics in the Cetaceans' Environment: A Multimedia Educational Package Our project, working title "Sea of Sound," is an education program about marine acoustics, especially as applies to marine mammals, natural and anthropogenic sound. The majority of the public perceives the undersea realm to be a largely silent world. While many people are aware that whales produce haunting songs or cacophonous clicks and whistles, most don't know the extent to which marine mammals use sounds to communicate, survey their environment, and find food. More surprising to many is that the sea is alive with sounds of all kinds, from bubbles in breaking waves and rumbling undersea volcanoes, to croaking fish, snapping shrimp, and rasping mollusks. The general public has a poor understanding of how the behavior of sound in marine environments compares with our terrestrial world. They also know little about the critical role sound plays in marine research and marine mammal conservation. While there is increasing public concern over rising levels of anthropogenic noise in the marine environment, there is a lack of comprehensive, broadly disseminated information about sound in the sea. This makes it difficult for the public to make informed decisions about sound-related marine issues. This education project aims to create and disseminate accurate information about sound in the sea, and to engage a broad cross section of Americans in the science of sound in the oceans. | |
| Commercialization of autonomous sensor systems for quantifying pCO2 and total inorganic carbon This research, funded under 2004's NOPP Topic 4B "Sensors for Sustained, Autonomous Measurement of Chemical or Biological Parameters in the Ocean" uses the NOPP funding to promote commercialization of the SAMI-CO2, a sensor developed for autonomous measurements of the partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in seawater. The SAMI-CO2 was commercialized in 1999 through an exclusive license from the University of Montana to Sunburst Sensors, a company in Missoula, Montana (see sunburstsensors.com). Field deployments by DeGrandpre and others have demonstrated the excellent long-term stability predicted by the SAMI's well-understood theoretical response. The design, however, is complex and prone to failures, especially by customers who are not trained to operate the SAMI. Incremental changes in the design have improved reliability, but a full redesign is required to implement modern electronic and manufacturing technology. The new design will allow individual investigators to make pCO2 measurements reliably over long time periods in widespread ocean locations on many different ocean platforms. | |
| Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) The long-term goal of the Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) project is to develop and test new technologies that are essential for solving a variety of interdisciplinary oceanographic problems of societal importance in coastal and open ocean environments. Problems of relevance to MOSEAN include: biogeochemical cycling, climate change effects, ocean pollution, harmful algal blooms (HABs), ocean ecology, and underwater visibility. | |
| Assessing the Impact of GODAE Boundary Conditions on the Estimate and Prediction of the Monterey Bay and California Central Coast Circulation The practical demonstration of basin-scale ocean state estimation has been realized through the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) whose projects provide complete descriptions of the temperature, salinity, and velocity structure of the global ocean. The ocean circulation, temperature and salinity distributions of coastal regions are characterized by smaller scale processes typically not resolved by basin-scale estimates of the ocean structure. The overarching goal of this project is to assess the impact of the large-scale ocean structure (as produced by GODAE), when used in conjunction with satellite observations, on the numerical prediction of the coastal ocean environment. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature (MISST) for GODAE The Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperatures (MISST) for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) project intends to produce an improved, high-resolution, global, near-real-time (NRT), sea surface temperature analysis through the combination of satellite observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors and to then demonstrate the impact of these improved sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. | |
| Real-Time Forecasting System of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goal of this partnership is to establish an operational forecasting system of the wind field and resulting waves and surge impacting the coastline during the approach and landfall of tropical cyclones. The results of this forecasting system would provide real-time information to the National Hurricane Center during the tropical cyclone season in the Atlantic for establishing improved advisories for the general public and federal agencies including military and civil emergency response teams. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to improve our capability to map, understand, and predict changes in currents and water properties in the coastal ocean. This capability is important for a wide range of purposes, including naval operations, search and rescue operations, commercial marine operations (including the influence of ocean currents on shipping and oil rigs), prediction of coastal hazards such as storm surge, prediction of pollution dispersion, and the influence of currents and water properties on coastal fisheries and ecosystems. Providing real-time (nowcast) and future (forecast) coastal ocean fields for these purposes require a coastal ocean nowcast/forecast system that consists of several components: 1. a high-quality ocean general circulation model; 2. accurate surface flux (atmospheric forcing) fields to drive the ocean model; 3. accurate estimates of coastal ocean fields at the start of a model run and along the lateral boundaries of the coastal domain during model runs; 4. accurate estimates of freshwater input from rivers and estuaries; and 5. high-quality ocean observations. The observations are necessary to provide the accurate initial and boundary fields required by component (3) and to evaluate the performance of the nowcast/forecast system. The central focus of this project is component (3), specifically to quantify and understand the impact of initial and boundary fields on coastal ocean nowcasts and forecasts, and to provide feedback that will motivate improvements in generating these fields. | |
| Transitioning Submersible Chemical Analyzer Technologies for Sustained, Autonomous Observations from Profiling Moorings, Gliders and other AUVs To transition existing prototype autonomous profiling nutrient analyzers into commercial products that can be readily deployed on autonomous profiling moorings, coastal gliders and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles and used for sustained, autonomous ocean observations of chemical distributions and variability. A series of issues have been identified that that need to be addressed to convert prototype nutrient analyzers into commercial units that can be widely used by the community for sustained and accurate, stable, autonomous operation in the ocean. These issues are; (1) a more compact size, (2) reduced reagent and power consumption, (3) enhanced biofouling suppression, (4) ease of use by non-chemists, and (5) documented performance when deployed on different platforms. Our plan to address those issues involves using recent advances in micro-fluidics and optical detectors (new SubChem and WET Labs technologies) to reduce sample flow rates and volumes and thus reagent and power consumption; (2) extend the length of field deployments by periodically isolating sensitive components so that back-flushing and chemical techniques can be used to suppress bio-fouling, (3) increase the ease of use by simplifying operation, pre-packaging reagents and outputting the data in engineering units, and (4) thoroughly documenting the performance by conducting demonstration experiments at field sites that have strong vertical and horizontal nutrient gradients and episodic phytoplankton blooms. We intend to achieve these goals through this NOPP partnership. The industry partners will take the lead in developing the commercial versions of the nutrient analyzers while the university and government partners will provide guidance defining the initial performance criteria for the nutrient analyzers and in providing the deployment platforms and conducting the field testing and demonstration experiments. | |
| Development of Mid-Frequency Multibeam Sonar for Fisheries Applications The long-term goal of this program is to investigate the utility of mid-frequency (1-10 kHz) acoustics to detect, enumerate, and identify pelagic fish distributions. Our strategy integrates biological and physical model predictions with field measurements and will combine results in computer visualizations and animations. Efforts are directed in three primary areas: sound propagation modeling, fish backscatter modeling, and mid-frequency multibeam development and field measurements. | |
| Measuring the behavior and response to sound of beaked whales using recording tags The goals of this project are to understand the reasons for, and to help to reduce, the strandings of two little-known species of beaked whales related to mid-frequency navy sonars. Although widely distributed, these cryptic species are extremely difficult to study and, until recently, almost nothing was known about their sub-surface behavior or vocalizations. The current project combines an advanced acoustic and orientation recording tag with visual survey, photo-identification and habitat characterization in productive field sites. Using these tools, we aim to provide a thorough characterization of the movement patterns, vocalizations, foraging styles, and preferred habitat of the two species. Understanding of these factors is critical to designing, and evaluating the success of, any mitigation measure. Results from the study are directed at two strategies to reduce beaked whale mortality: first, with a specification of how and when these animals vocalize, it may be possible to develop systems for passive acoustic detection of beaked whales. Since beaked whales are so difficult to sight, acoustic detection is a critical method to monitor for the presence of these sensitive species. The second, longer-term strategy is to determine what factors heighten the risk of stranding and to identify opportunities to minimize these. While such risk factors may become evident upon examining the behavior of undisturbed animals, we will also evaluate the practicality of studying the responses of beaked whales to low levels of sonar-like sounds as a means to define safe exposure limits. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Puget Sound, Washington, is both the largest fjord in the lower forty-eight states and closest to the substantial urban centers of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and surrounding communities. The sound has seasonally high annual phytoplankton standing stock and primary production, and they support several economically valuable fisheries. Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the Sound's circulation and marine ecosystem, and of the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations; and to develop models of Puget Sound that can aid agencies with responsibilities for environmental management in making informed decisions and serve as marine science education tools. | |
| Continuous Monitoring of Fish Population and Behavior by Instantaneous Continental-Shelf-Scale Imaging with Ocean-Waveguide Acoustics The long-term goals of this program are to (1) instantaneously detect, image and spatially chart fish populations over continental-shelf scales, and (2) continuously monitor the areal densities and behavior of these fish populations over time using a novel low to mid frequency acoustic system (300-5000Hz) referred to as Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS). This new method will be applied to explore the abundance, temporal and spatial distributions and behavior of fish populations in the Gulf of Maine on and near Georges Bank, a marine ecosystem being studied in the Census of Marine Life program. OAWRS will become an invaluable conservation tool for rapid imaging and enumeration of large scale fish populations over thousands of square kilometers to effectively monitor and manage the national fish stock. | |
| A NOPP Partnership for Skin Sea-Surface Temperature Sea surface temperature (SST) is an important parameter in many operational and research activities, ranging from weather forecasting to climate research. The goals of this project are to demonstrate the use of autonomous infrared radiometers that measure the skin SST to absolute accuracies that are useful for the validation of global SST fields derived from measurements on earth-observation satellites, to use these measurements to determine the accuracies of such remotely-sensed SSTs, and to demonstrate the use of skin SSTs in forecast models. | |
| Surface Circulation Radar Mapping in Alaskan Coastal Waters: Field Study Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet Our long term goals are twofold. First want to obtain spatial and temporal surface circulation fields for lower Cook Inlet and the central Beaufort Sea shelf in regions of offshore marine industrial activities. These measurements will contribute to the baseline oceanography for these two regions where few in situ current measurements have been made, and will therefore help to promote the general understanding of surface currents in these areas. These investigations will be an important undertaking for the Minerals Management Service (MMS) future efforts to model potential oil spills and for possible spill response and oil spill contingency planning. The data can also be used by MMS for model comparison and validation, for both hydrodynamic models as well as general circulation models. By disseminating the data over the internet in real-time, these data will assist professional users with a need for information for ship tracking and touring, coastal zone management, sediment transport, search and rescue operations, oil spill and other pollutant response. Our second goal is to develop an understanding of the limitations of high-frequency (HF) surface current-mapping radars in seasonally ice-covered seas and the ability of these systems to function in relatively remote settings. | |
| An Integrated Coastal Wireless Network The goal of this study is to define a wireless network architecture that can be deployed to enable contiguous coastal area network coverage for scientific, commercial, and homeland security (e.g. Coast Guard) applications within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in a manner that is flexible, manageable, and affordable. As described in Reference 1, we intend to determine the architectural requirements of such a system, delineate suitable technologies that will achieve such a vision, and provide a plan to demonstrate the concept. | |
| The Argo Project Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 5 of the 5-year project, and builds on progress made by previous awards (Phases 1 and 2) for pilot float arrays and data system development. By the middle of 2007, Argo will have deployed a global array of 3000 profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2002, Gould, 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. The Argo array will provide unprecedented views of the evolving physical state of the ocean. It will reveal the physical processes that balance the large-scale heat and freshwater budgets of the ocean and will provide a crucial dataset for initialization of and assimilation in seasonal-to-decadal forecast models. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System. | |
| Boundary Conditions, Data Assimilation, and Predictability in Coastal Ocean Models The long-terms goals of this research are to improve our ability to understand and predict environmental conditions in the coastal ocean. | |
| Development of fluorescent induction and relaxation systems for the measurement of biomass and primary productivity on Webb Slocum gliders Despite their relatively small area continental shelves are disproportionately important in biogeochemical cycles; however quantifying the transport and transformation of organic matter on continental shelves is difficult due to the numerous processes operating over a wide range of space (meters to 100s of kilometers) and time (hours to years) scales. Traditional sampling strategies are hard pressed to sample the relevant scales; however autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have advanced to the point that they now allow scientists maintain a continuous presence in the sea. Over the last decade, the pump-and-probe and Fast Repetition Rate (FRRF) Fluorometers have provided unprecedented insight into the factors controlling phytoplankton physiology and primary production in the ocean. The use of the fluorescence kinetics is increasingly becoming an integral part of many oceanographic field programs, but its broad community use is limited by the complexity and high cost of the available instrumentation. These systems are limited to just a few labs even though these measurements are becoming increasingly central to field work and have been commercially available for almost a decade. To overcome these problems, we have designed and built a new instrument, called Fluorescence Induction and Relaxation (FIRe) System, to measure a comprehensive suite of photosynthetic characteristics in phytoplankton and benthic organisms. This NOPP will develop a miniaturized cost effective small biological sensor capable of measuring the concentration, physiological state and productivity of phytoplankton. Specifically, we will miniaturize a new compact FIRe system which will be combined with Aanderaa 3835 oxygen electrodes and mount them in Webb Sloccum Gliders. We will also begin the design strategies for the development of optically-based nitrate sensor. Our ultimate goal is to develop an autonomous platform that will be used to characterize the productivity of the contintal shelves. | |
| The Environmental Sample Processor (ESP): A Device for Detecting Microoganisms In Situ Using Molecular Probe Technology Molecular diagnostic procedures for identifying water-borne microorganisms and for elucidating the roles they play in biogeochemical cycles are central to many research and resource management activities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. However, such methods generally require the return of discrete samples to a laboratory for analysis at a later time. The primary goal of the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) project is to develop an in situ instrument that allows us to overcome that impediment by enabling autonomous sample collection and application of molecular probe technology to detect water-borne microorganisms remotely (http://www.mbari.org/microbial/ESP/). A longer-term goal is to deploy an array of internet-accessible ESP's in support of basic environmental research and resource management activities consistent with a national and international ocean and watershed observing initiatives such as OOI/ORION, IOOS, GOOS, NEON, GEOHAB, OHH, etc. | |
| Understanding and Predicting Changes in the Ocean Science, Technology and Operations Workforce The goals of this workforce study are to (1) produce a more complete description of the present state of the ocean science, technology, and operations (OSTO) workforce; (2) anticipate future developments and predict the evolution of this workforce; and (3) characterize the educational programs that will be needed to respond to expected workforce changes. Initially, the project will focus on the workforce required to support current and planned ocean observing systems (OOS) efforts; it will then expand to include related sectors of the economy such as telecommunications, hydrographic surveying, the oil and gas industry and others. | |
| High-level Data Fusion Software for SHOALS-1000TH FY06 Annual Report Optech International and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) have partnered to develop and apply data fusion techniques to combine active and passive remote sensing data for mapping shallow-water and coastal environments. During this reporting period we have: (1) established a collaboration between industry and academia focused on the use of bathymetric lidar and simultaneous passive spectral data for shoreline mapping and characterization; (2) produced a novel paradigm which can be used to formally compare and contrast different strategies for data fusion; (3) developed and implemented 3 high-level data fusion algorithms; (4) disseminated datasets to several other researchers; and (5) worked to understand regional-scale coastal environmental processes through the use of these data. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Sustained Global Ocean State Estimation for Scientific and Practical Application This consortium project is attempting to use all existing ocean observations, including particularly, satellite data, for the purpose of understanding and ultimately predicting, the ocean on climate time-scales. To this end it is advancing ocean "state estimation" as a practical, quasi-operational tool, for studying the ocean circulation and its influence on societal problems such as climate change, sea level rise, and biological impacts. Observing the ocean is difficult owing to its turbulent nature and very large range of energetic spatial scales. This project is establishing the means by which a quantitative description of the global ocean is and will be routinely and continuously available. The methodology employs state-of-the-art general circulation models, statistical estimation techniques, and the complete range of available oceanic observations, including, particularly, global satellite data, as well as in situ observations of all kinds. The effort includes further demonstration of the practical utility of ocean observing systems through their use in important scientific goals. | |
Fiscal Year 2005 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Novel Acoustic Techniques for Assessing Fish Schooling in the Context of an Operational Ocean Observatory Fish aggregation is important in terms of biology, fisheries, and measurement, quantitative analyses of gregarious movement behaviors remain relatively rare (Turchin 1989). Fish aggregation has most often been studied in easily accessed fish or fish easily maintained in the laboratory such as minnows and dace (see a review in Pitcher and Parrish 1993). Measurements of fish aggregations are often difficult, particularly in pelagic environments. Our goal is to develop new acoustic techniques that have the potential to serve as measurement tools to quantify this ubiquitous and important behavior. | |
| An Annotated and Federated Digital Library of Marine Animal Sounds The Macaulay Library is the world's largest archive of animal sounds and has been selected by the Office of Naval Research as a major repository for the deposition, digital archival, review, and retrieval of the many recordings of marine animals made over the last half-century. Archived marine recordings pose challenging retrieval problems given the typically long intervals of silence between animal sounds and the multiplicity of species detectable in any given recording. One goal of this project is to design software that will permit remote experts to annotate the content of long recordings archived at the Macaulay Library through their web browsers. Annotations will permit subsequent searches of the archive database to retrieve not only suitable recordings, but also those parts of a recording meeting the search criteria. The project also seeks to define and extract a set of acoustic features from all archived marine recordings that can be used in subsequent search and retrieval tasks. Both capabilities will be unique to this sound collection, and will greatly enhance the accessibility and the utility of the archive to scientists, students, educators, military personnel, and the media. | |
| Investigations of Chemosynthetic Communities on the Lower Continental Slope of the Gulf of Mexico The long-term goals of this study are to add to the understanding of the oceanography and ecology of the deep-sea with emphasis on cold seep communities and hard bottom communities on the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) continental slope. Preliminary studies have shown that seep communities at the slope base are different from those on the upper slope, in much the same way that the normal background fauna differ. Compared to the upper-slope, there is limited understanding of seep and other hard bottom communities below 1,000 meters in the Gulf of Mexico. TDI-Brooks' project team will meet MMS' information needs concerning the location and functioning of seep communities deeper than 1,000 meters. | |
| Development of a Mass Spectrometer for Deployment on Moorings and Cabled Observatories for Long-Term Unattended Observation of Low-Molecular Weight Chemicals in the Water Column The goals of this project are to address the need for advanced chemical sensing in the ocean environment through development of a new mass spectrometer for long-term unattended deployment. The mass spectrometer is based on Monitor Instruments' miniature cycloidal mass analyzer technology and oceanographic components developed by WHOI. Testing and trial deployments will be carried out by WHOI at its Deep Submergence Laboratory and Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO). Monitor Instruments will carry out commercialization of this instrument, which will be known as TETHYS (TETHered Yearlong Spectrometer). | |
| Operational Utilization of High Resolution Ocean Surface Wind Vectors (25km or better) in the Marine Forecasting Environment The work proposed here seeks to exploit currently and soon to be available satellite ocean surface vector wind data in the operational weather forecasting environment. This work will build upon an ongoing effort to quantify the impacts of QuikSCAT ocean vector wind data in the operational short-term warnings and forecasts issued by the NWS Ocean Prediction Center (OPC), and extends the effort to include the NWS Tropical Prediction Center and OCENS, Inc, a small company specializing in ocean and weather monitoring tools and services for the commercial and recreational marine users. In addition to the standard 25km wind vector products from QuikSCAT, this effort will also investigate the impacts of higher spatial resolution wind vector products (12.5km and higher) and the wind vector retrieval capabilities of WindSAT, a polarimetric microwave radiometer. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction With the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) A broad partnership of institutions is collaborating in developing and demonstrating the performance and application of eddy-resolving, real-time global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). These systems will be transitioned for operational use by the U.S. Navy at both the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO), Stennis Space Center, MS, and the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), Monterey, CA, and by NOAA at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Washington, D.C. The systems will run efficiently on a variety of massively parallel computers and will include sophisticated, but relatively inexpensive, data assimilation techniques for assimilation of satellite altimeter sea surface height (SSH) and sea surface temperature (SST) as well as in-situ temperature, salinity, and float displacement. The project partnership represents a truly broad spectrum of the oceanographic community, bringing together academia, federal agencies, and industry/commercial entities, spanning modeling, data assimilation, data management and serving, observational capabilities, and application of HYCOM prediction system outputs. The institutions participating in this partnership have long histories of supporting and carrying out a wide range of oceanographic and ocean prediction-related research and data management. All institutions are committed to validating an operational hybrid-coordinate ocean model that combines the strengths of the vertical coordinates used in the present generation of ocean models by placing them where they perform best. This collaborative partnership provides an opportunity to leverage and accelerate the efforts of existing and planned projects, in order to produce a higher quality product that will collectively better serve a wider range of users than would the individual projects. | |
| A Novel Technique to Detect Epipelagic Fish Populations and Map their Habitat The ultimate goal of this project is to substantially improve our understanding of the relation between ecologically important key fish species (e.g. sardine and albacore) and the physical environment by collecting synoptic measurements with improved spatial and temporal resolution of observations. | |
| Understanding Apex Predator and Pelagic Fish Habitat Utilization in the California Current System by Integrating Animal Tracking with in situ Oceanographic Observations The team assembled includes researchers from the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station. Researchers from these organizations will be responsible for orchestrating simultaneous multi-species tagging efforts. Oceanographers from the Environmental Research Division (ERD) at NMFS will provide expertise in remote sensing of the Northeast Pacific oceanography. The integration and analysis of the diverse datasets requires the development of new software which is being developed by the NMFS, UCSC, and Stanford as well as researchers from Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU) in Scotland. Using these software programs as well as others, we plan to map the oceanic habitats used by top predators in the California Current System (CCS). This will be done by examining both top down and bottom up processes, and predicting how climate variability impacts the distribution and utilization of oceanic habitats within the CCS. We are also developing methods that are required to integrate animal collected data into existing oceanographic databases. | |
| Acoustics in the Cetaceans' Environment: A Multimedia Educational Package The Macaulay Library is home to the world's largest collection of animal sounds, including a growing collection of marine sounds whose archival is funded by the Office of Naval Research. The Macaulay Library has an 80 year history of archiving sounds and using those sounds to educate and inform the public about biological diversity and animal communication. In the last few years, the Library has added video production to its public outreach functions. This project, for which we use the working title "Sea-of-Sound" is our most ambitious video outreach project to date. We are developing a documentary on use of sound in the marine environment, both natural and anthropogenic. While many people are aware that whales produce songs, clicks, and whistles, most don't know the extent to which marine mammals use sounds to communicate, survey their environment, and find food. More surprising to many is that the sea is alive with sounds of all kinds, from bubbles in breaking waves and rumbling undersea volcanoes, to croaking fish, snapping shrimp, and rasping mollusks. The general public has a poor understanding of how the behavior of sound in marine environments compares with our terrestrial world. They also know little about the critical role sound plays in marine research and marine mammal conservation. While there is increasing public concern over rising levels of anthropogenic noise in the marine environment, there is a lack of comprehensive, broadly disseminated information about sound in the sea. This makes it difficult for the public to make informed decisions about sound-related marine issues. Working with our partners we will be creating a DVD and website for classrooms and teachers, as well as the general public. These deliverables will be available in the third year of this project, the beginning of calendar year 2007. | |
| Commercialization of autonomous sensor systems for quantifying pCO2 and total inorganic carbon Our research efforts are directed toward developing a variety of innovative chemical sensors. In addition to CO2, we are working toward developing innovative alkalinity and pH sensors and incorporating our technology into autonomous long-term monitors. | |
| Radar-based Detection, Tracking and Speciation of Marine Mammals From Ships In addition to ship strikes, another cause of marine mammal injury and death is from exposure to high acoustic source levels, e.g., those encountered during Navy-sponsored Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar tests. Irrespective of the method of mammal injury or death, the act of injuring or killing whales can and does result in litigation proceedings. This is a consequence of the legal protection that Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) are granted in U.S. waters by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (as amended in 1994), with some species additionally protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Previously developed mitigation technologies, such as passive acoustic and visual observation, although promising, still fall significantly short of achieving the detection performance necessary to achieve full marine mammal mitigation. Radar surveillance technology, being developed under the current supported program, represents a fundamental paradigm shift and new approach toward the goal of achieving robust marine mammal mitigation. Figure 1 shows an example of two humpbacks detected at a range of 8 km. in both a high-powered EO telescope (right-panel) and in simultaneous, co-registered radar imagery (left-panel) during a prior funded cliff-based demonstration of this technology. The eventual long-term goal of this work, if successful under the baseline and option programs, is to develop and transition this new radar surveillance technology to both the military and commercial fleets. The primary benefit would be the mitigation of harmful effects on marine mammals due to acoustic testing and ship strikes. | |
| Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) The Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) project has the long-term goal of developing and testing new technologies that will lead to increased observations that are essential for solving a variety of interdisciplinary oceanographic problems of societal importance. These include: biogeochemical cycling, climate change effects, ocean pollution, harmful algal blooms (HABs), ocean ecology, and underwater visibility. The collective MOSEAN sensors will be able to sample key variables that are vital to solve problems in nearshore to coastal to open ocean environments. | |
| Assessing the Impact of GODAE Boundary Conditions on the Estimate and Prediction of the Monterey Bay and California Central Coast Circulation The practical demonstration of basin-scale ocean state estimation has been realized through the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) whose projects provide complete descriptions of the temperature, salinity, and velocity structure of the global ocean. The ocean circulation, temperature and salinity distributions of coastal regions are characterized by smaller scale processes typically not resolved by basin-scale estimates of the ocean structure. The overarching goal of this project is to assess the impact of the large-scale ocean structure (as produced by GODAE), when used in conjunction with satellite observations, on the numerical prediction of the coastal ocean environment. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature (MISST) for GODAE The Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperatures (MISST) for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) project intends to produce an improved, high-resolution, global, near-real-time (NRT), sea surface temperature analysis through the combination of satellite observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors and to then demonstrate the impact of these improved sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. SST is one of the most important variables related to the global ocean-atmosphere system. It is a key indicator for climate change and is widely applied to studies of upper ocean processes, to air-sea heat exchange, and as a boundary condition for numerical weather prediction. The importance of SST to accurate weather forecasting of both severe events and daily weather has been increasingly recognized over the past several years. Despite the importance and wide usage of operational SST analyses, significant weaknesses remain in the existing operational products. The improved sensors on the Terra, Aqua, and EnviSAT-1 satellites, in conjunction with previously existing sensors on several other US Navy, NASA, and NOAA satellites, provide the opportunity for notable advances in SST measurement. In addition to more frequent coverage for increased temporal resolution, these sensors permit the combination of highly complementary IR and MW retrievals. While clouds, aerosols, and atmospheric water vapor affect IR retrievals, these phenomena have little impact on MW retrievals. Characteristically, IR SST provides high spatial resolution (~1 km at nadir) but poorer coverage with the presence of clouds. Although having a reduced resolution (~25 km grid), MW SST provide >90% coverage of the global ocean each day. These factors have motivated interest in the development of merged IR and MW SST products to leverage the positive characteristics of each sensor type. Merging multiple SST sensors into a single analysis will result in enhanced reliability, availability, and accuracy. This project has two distinct goals: (1) producing an improved sea surface temperature (SST) product through the combination of observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors, and (2) demonstrating the impact of improved multi-sensor SST products on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. Close collaboration and the international coordinated exchange of SST products with error statistics with operational agencies will optimize utility of these new data streams by US and international operational agencies. Innovative techniques to blend these complementary data will be applied in operational frameworks at NOAA and Navy. This project will make a direct US contribution to the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) by working within the GODAE High-Resolution SST Pilot Project (GHRSST-PP), initiated by the international GODAE steering team, to coordinate the production of a new generation high-resolution SST. By contributing to the GHRSST-PP this team will minimize duplication of efforts, harmonize research and development activities, and maximize data access. Consolidation of the numerous SST data products into optimal, easily accessible, new generation products shared by the US and international community, will be particularly valuable as it will maximize the synergy benefits of previously unavailable combined IR and MW SST products. This effort will ensure that US scientists and operational activities remain at the forefront of the international ocean and weather forecasting activities and are provided with state-of-the-art SST data products and analyses. | |
| Real-Time Forecasting System of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goal of this partnership is to establish an operational forecasting system of the wind field and resulting waves and surge impacting the coastline during the approach and landfall of tropical cyclones. The results of this forecasting system would provide real-time information to the National Hurricane Center during the tropical cyclone season in the Atlantic for establishing improved advisories for the general public and federal agencies including military and civil emergency response teams. | |
| HYCOM Coastal Ocean Hindcasts and Predictions: Impact of Nesting in HYCOM GODAE Assimilative Hindcasts The overarching goal is to improve our capability to model and understand currents and water properties in the coastal ocean, and to improve our capability to forecast future changes in these currents and water properties. Coastal ocean models are used for a wide range of purposes, including naval operations, commercial marine operations (including the influence of ocean currents on shipping and oil rigs), storm surge prediction, prediction of pollution dispersion, studies of coastal fisheries and ecosystems, and providing ocean currents for search and rescue operations. This project focuses on one important aspect of improving the performance of coastal ocean models, specifically improving the quality of the fields that are used to initialize these models and provide information on water properties and currents outside of the coastal region being modeled. Although the coastal ocean is strongly influenced by surface atmospheric forcing and coastal freshwater runoff, offshore ocean variability exerts a very significant influence in many regions due to a wide range of processes such as basin-scale climate variability, boundary current meanders, and offshore ocean eddies. To accurately represent the influence of this offshore variability on a coastal ocean model, the model must be nested within fields that accurately represent (1) the initial state of the coastal ocean throughout the model domain and (2) currents and water properties at the nested model boundaries. We will specifically evaluate the use of the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) data assimilation product developed as part of the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) for this purpose. The influence of these initial and boundary fields on the performance of the coastal model will be thoroughly evaluated. This information will provide important feedback that will be used to guide improvements to the HYCOM-GODAE product that provides the initial and boundary fields. The overall regional focus will encompass the coastal Gulf of Mexico through the Florida Straits, which represent a broad range of shelf geometries, river runoff, seasonal atmospheric forcing differences, and both weak and strong offshore forcing to enable the impact of the HYCOM GODAE product to be studied over a wide range of conditions. | |
| Transitioning Submersible Chemical Analyzer Technologies for Sustained, Autonomous Observations from Profiling Moorings, Gliders and other AUVs To transition existing prototype autonomous profiling nutrient analyzers into commercial products that can be readily deployed on autonomous profiling moorings, coastal gliders and propeller driven unmanned underwater vehicles and used for sustained, autonomous ocean observations of chemical distributions and variability. A series of issues have been identified that that need to be addressed to convert prototype nutrient analyzers into commercial units that can be widely used by the community for sustained and accurate, stable, autonomous operation in the ocean. These issues are; (1) a more compact size, (2) reduced reagent and power consumption, (3) enhanced biofouling suppression, (4) ease of use by non-chemists, and (5) documented performance when deployed on different platforms. Our plan to address those issues involves using recent advances in micro-fluidics and optical detectors (new SubChem and WET Labs technologies) to reduce sample flow rates and volumes and thus reagent and power consumption; (2) extend the length of field deployments by periodically isolating sensitive components so that back-flushing and chemical techniques can be used to suppress bio-fouling, (3) increase the ease of use by simplifying operation, pre-packaging reagents and outputting the data in engineering units, and (4) thoroughly documenting the performance by conducting demonstration experiments at field sites that have strong vertical and horizontal nutrient gradients and episodic phytoplankton blooms. We intend to achieve these goals through this NOPP partnership. The industry partners will take the lead in developing the commercial versions of the nutrient analyzers while the university and government partners will provide guidance defining the initial performance criteria for the nutrient analyzers and in providing the deployment platforms and conducting the field testing and demonstration experiments. | |
| Development of Mid-Frequency Multibeam Sonar for Fisheries Applications The long-term goal of this program is to investigate the utility of mid-frequency (1-10 kHz) acoustics to detect, enumerate, and identify pelagic fish distributions. Our strategy integrates model predictions with field measurements and will combine results in computer visualizations and animations. | |
| Measuring the behavior and response to sound of beaked whales using recording tags The goals of this project are to understand the reasons for, and to help to reduce, the strandings of two little-known species of beaked whales related to mid-frequency navy sonars. Although widely distributed, these cryptic species are extremely difficult to study and, until recently, almost nothing was known about their sub-surface behavior or vocalizations. The current project combines an advanced acoustic and orientation recording tag with visual survey, photo-identification and habitat characterization in productive field sites. Using these tools, we aim to provide a thorough characterization of the movement patterns, vocalizations, foraging styles, and preferred habitat of the two species. Understanding of these factors is critical to designing, and evaluating the success of, any mitigation measure. Results from the study are directed at two strategies to reduce beaked whale mortality: first, with a specification of how and when these animals vocalize, it may be possible to develop systems for passive acoustic detection of beaked whales. Since beaked whales are so difficult to sight, acoustic detection is a critical method to monitor for the presence of these sensitive species. The second, longer-term strategy is to determine what factors heighten the risk of stranding and to identify opportunities to minimize these. While such risk factors may become evident upon examining the behavior of undisturbed animals, we will also evaluate the practicality of studying the responses of beaked whales to low levels of sonar-like sounds as a means to define safe exposure limits. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Puget Sound, Washington, is both the largest fjord in the lower forty-eight states and closest to the substantial urban centers of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and surrounding communities. The sound has seasonally high annual phytoplankton standing stock and primary production, and they support several economically valuable fisheries. Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the Sound's circulation and marine ecosystem, and of the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations; and to develop models of Puget Sound that can aid agencies with responsibilities for environmental management in making informed decisions and serve as marine science education tools. | |
| Continuous Monitoring of Fish Population and Behavior by Instantaneous Continental-Shelf-Scale Imaging with Ocean-Waveguide Acoustics The long-term goals of this program are to (1) instantaneously detect, image and spatially chart fish populations over continental-shelf scales, and (2) continuously monitor the areal densities and behavior of these fish populations over time using a novel low to mid frequency acoustic system (300-5000Hz) referred to as Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS). This new method will be applied to explore the abundance, temporal and spatial distributions and behavior of fish populations in the Gulf of Maine on and near Georges Bank, a marine ecosystem being studied in the Census of Marine Life program. OAWRS will become an invaluable conservation tool for rapid imaging and enumeration of large scale fish populations over thousands of square kilometers to effectively monitor and manage the national fish stock. | |
| A NOPP Partnership for Skin Sea-Surface Temperature Sea surface temperature (SST) is an important parameter in many operational and research activities, ranging from weather forecasting to climate research. The goals of this project are to demonstrate the use of autonomous infrared radiometers that measure the skin SST to absolute accuracies that are useful for the validation of global SST fields derived from measurements on earth-observation satellites, to use these measurements to determine the accuracies of such remotely-sensed SSTs, and to demonstrate the use of skin SSTs in forecast models. | |
| Surface Circulation Radar Mapping in Alaskan Coastal Waters: Field Study Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet Our primary goal with this project is to obtain spatial and temporal surface circulation fields for a portion of lower Cook Inlet and the central Beaufort Sea shelf in the vicinity of offshore oil production. These measurements will contribute to the baseline oceanography of two regions where few in situ current measurements have been made, and will therefore help to promote the general understanding of surface currents in these areas. These investigations will be an important undertaking for the Minerals Management Service (MMS) future efforts to model potential oil spills and for possible spill response and oil spill contingency planning. The data can also be used by MMS for model comparison and validation, for both hydrodynamic models as well as general circulation models. By disseminating the data over the internet in real-time, these data will assist professional users with a need for information for ship tracking and touring, coastal zone management, sediment transport, search and rescue operations, oil spill and other pollutant response. | |
| An Integrated Coastal Wireless Network The goal of this study is to define a wireless network architecture that can be deployed to enable contiguous coastal area network coverage for scientific, commercial, and homeland security (e.g. Coast Guard) applications within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in a manner that is flexible, manageable, and affordable. As described in Reference 1, we intend to determine the architectural requirements of such a system, delineate suitable technologies that will achieve such a vision, and provide a plan to demonstrate the concept. | |
| The Argo Project Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 4 of the 5-year project, and builds on progress made by previous awards (Phases 1 and 2) for pilot float arrays and data system development. By the end of 2006 or early 2007, Argo will have deployed a global array of 3000 profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2002, Gould, 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. The Argo array will provide unprecedented views of the evolving physical state of the ocean. It will reveal the physical processes that balance the large-scale heat and freshwater budgets of the ocean and will provide a crucial dataset for initialization of and assimilation in seasonal-to-decadal forecast models. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System. | |
| PARADIGM: The Partnership for Advancing Interdisciplinary Global Modeling - Year 4 Annual Report To develop an efficient, community-based coupled biogeochemical-physical modeling framework that will enable the addition of new oceanographic processes in a straightforward and transparent manner, allowing new model structures to be developed and explored as our understanding of ocean ecology and biogeochemistry improves. To develop such a modeling framework within the context of our initial, specific overarching scientific focus: an inter-comparison study between the subtropical-subpolar gyre systems of the North Pacific and North Atlantic basins, including an explicit coastal component, with particular emphasis on understanding:o new paradigms for physical and chemical control of plankton community structure and function, o the consequences for biogeochemical cycling, o the effects of sub-mesoscale and mesoscale forcing, and o the dynamics of long-term, climate driven ecosystem regime shifts. In support of these, we have programs to meet the challenge of merging observations and models through: o advanced data assimilation techniques, o the development of interdisciplinary data products for incorporation into models, and o the application of new statistical and complex dynamical systems analysis techniques. The merging of observations and models supports a rigorous model validation program that is central to PARADIGM. | |
| Boundary Conditions, Data Assimilation, and Predictability in Coastal Ocean Models The long-terms goals of this research are to improve our ability to understand and predict environmental conditions in the coastal ocean. | |
| Long Term Surface Salinity Measurements Our long-term goal is to establish a reliable system for monitoring surface salinity around the global ocean. Salinity is a strong indicator of the freshwater cycle and has a great influence on upper ocean stratification. Global salinity measurements have potential to improve climate forecasts if an observation system can be developed. | |
| Development of fluorescent induction and relaxation systems for the measurement of biomass and primary productivity on Webb Slocum gliders Despite their relatively small area continental shelves are disproportionately important in biogeochemical cycles; however quantifying the transport and transformation of organic matter on continental shelves is difficult due to the numerous processes operating over a wide range of space (meters to 100s of kilometers) and time (hours to years) scales. Traditional sampling strategies are hard pressed to sample the relevant scales; however autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) have advanced to the point that they now allow scientists maintain a continuous presence in the sea. Over the last decade, the pump-and-probe and Fast Repetition Rate (FRRF) Fluorometers have provided unprecedented insight into the factors controlling phytoplankton physiology and primary production in the ocean. The use of the fluorescence kinetics is increasingly becoming an integral part of many oceanographic field programs, but its broad community use is limited by the complexity and high cost of the available instrumentation. These systems are limited to just a few labs even though these measurements are becoming increasingly central to field work and have been commercially available for almost a decade. To overcome these problems, we have designed and built a new instrument, called Fluorescence Induction and Relaxation (FIRe) System, to measure a comprehensive suite of photosynthetic characteristics in phytoplankton and benthic organisms. This NOPP will develop a miniaturized cost effective small biological sensor capable of measuring the concentration, physiological state and productivity of phytoplankton. Specifically, we will miniaturize a new compact FIRe syste which will be combined with Aanderaa 3835 oxygen electrodes and mount them in Webb Sloccum Gliders. We will also begin the design strategies for the development of optically-based nitrate sensor. Our ultimate goal is to develop an autonomous patform that will be used to characterize the productivity of the contintal shelves. | |
| The Environmental Sample Processor (ESP): A Device for Detecting Microoganisms In Situ Using Molecular Probe Technology Molecular diagnostic procedures for identifying water-borne microorganisms and for elucidating the roles they play in biogeochemical cycles are central to many research and resource management activities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere. However, such methods generally require the return of discrete samples to a laboratory for analysis at a later time. The primary goal of the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP) project is to develop an in situ instrument that allows us to overcome that impediment by enabling autonomous sample collection and application of molecular probe technology to detect water-borne microorganisms remotely (http://www.mbari.org/microbial/ESP/). A longer-term goal is to deploy an array of internet-accessible ESP's in support of basic environmental research and resource management activities consistent with a national and international ocean and watershed observing initiatives such as OOI/ORION, IOOS, GOOS, NEON, GEOHAB, OHH, etc. | |
| High-level Data Fusion Software for SHOALS-1000TH FY05 Annual Report Optech International and the Department of Marine Science at the University of Southern Mississippi will partner to develop and apply data fusion techniques for application to environmental mapping problems in the shallow-water and coastal environments. This work will lead to: (1) a robust collaboration between industry and academia focused on the use of airborne remote sensing technologies for near-shore and coastal analysis; (2) the emergence of a data fusion paradigm wherein a larger community of researchers can understand and eventually contribute to this work; (3) dissemination of appropriate data sets into the larger community; and ultimately to (4) improved understanding of regional-scale coastal environmental processes which will be realized thorough the structured analysis of combined airborne lidar and passive spectral data. | |
Fiscal Year 2004 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| An Annotated and Federated Digital Library of Marine Animal Sounds The Macaulay Library is the world's largest archive of animal sounds and has been selected by the Office of Naval Research as a major repository for the deposition, digital archival, review, and retrieval of the many recordings of marine animals made over the last half century. Archived marine recordings pose challenging retrieval problems given the typically long intervals of silence between animal sounds and the multiplicity of species detectable in any given recording. One goal of this project is to design software that will permit remote experts to annotate the content of long recordings archived at the Macaulay Library through their web browsers. Annotations will permit subsequent searches of the archive database to retrieve not only suitable recordings, but also those parts of a recording meeting the search criteria. The project also seeks to define and extract a set of acoustic features from all archived marine recordings that can be used in subsequent search and retrieval tasks. Both capabilities will be unique to this sound collection, and will greatly enhance the accessibility and the utility of the archive to scientists, students, educators, military personnel, and the media. | |
| Operational Utilization of High Resolution Ocean Surface Wind Vectors (25km or better) in the Marine Forecasting Environment The work proposed here seeks to exploit currently and soon to be available satellite ocean surface vector wind data in the operational weather forecasting environment. This work will build upon an ongoing effort to quantify the impacts of QuikSCAT ocean vector wind data in the operational short-term warnings and forecasts issued by the NWS Ocean Prediction Center (OPC), and extends the effort to include the NWS Tropical Prediction Center and OCENS, Inc, a small company specializing in ocean and weather monitoring tools and services for the commercial and recreational marine users. In addition to the standard 25km wind vector products from QuikSCAT, this effort will also investigate the impacts of higher spatial resolution wind vector products (12.5km and higher) and the wind vector retrieval capabilities of WindSAT, a polarimetric microwave radiometer. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction with the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) A broad partnership of institutions is collaborating in developing and demonstrating the performance and application of eddy-resolving, real-time global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). These systems will be transitioned for operational use by the U.S. Navy at both the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO), Stennis Space Center, MS, and the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), Monterey, CA, and by NOAA at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Washington, D.C. The systems will run efficiently on a variety of massively parallel computers and will include sophisticated, but relatively inexpensive, data assimilation techniques for assimilation of satellite altimeter sea surface height (SSH) and sea surface temperature (SST) as well as in-situ temperature, salinity, and float displacement. The project partnership represents a truly broad spectrum of the oceanographic community, bringing together academia, federal agencies, and industry/commercial entities, spanning modeling, data assimilation, data management and serving, observational capabilities, and application of HYCOM prediction system outputs. The institutions participating in this partnership have long histories of supporting and carrying out a wide range of oceanographic and ocean prediction-related research and data management. All institutions are committed to validating an operational hybrid-coordinate ocean model that combines the strengths of the vertical coordinates used in the present generation of ocean models by placing them where they perform best. This collaborative partnership provides an opportunity to leverage and accelerate the efforts of existing and planned projects, in order to produce a higher quality product that will collectively better serve a wider range of users than would the individual projects. In addition to operational eddy-resolving global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems for the U.S. Navy and NOAA, respectively, this project offers an outstanding opportunity for NOAA-Navy collaboration and cooperation ranging from research to the operational level. This effort is part of a 5-year (FY04-08) multi-institutional National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) project which includes the U. of Miami (E. Chassignet, G. Halliwell, M. Iskandarani, T. Chin, A. Mariano, Z. Garraffo, A. Srinivasan, P. Minnett, R. Evans, W. Schmitz), NRL/STENNIS (H. Hurlburt, A. Wallcraft, J. Metzger, B. Kara, J. Cummings, G. Jacobs, H. Ngodock, L. Parent, C.A. Blain, P. Hogan, J. Kindle), NAVOCEANO (E. Johnson, J. Harding), FNMOC (M. Clancy), NRL/MONTEREY (R. Hodur, M. Flatau, X. Hong, J. Pullen), NOAA/NCEP/MMAB (D.B. Rao, C. Lozano), NOAA/NOS (F. Aikman), NOAA/AOML (C. Thacker), NOAA/PMEL (S. Hankin), Planning System Inc. (O.M. Smedstad, B. Lunde), LANL (R. Bleck), CSIRO (D. Bi ), SHOM (R. Baraille), LEGI (P. Brasseur), OPeNDAP (P. Cornillon), U. of N. Carolina (C. Werner), Rutgers (J. Wilkin, D. Haidvogel), U. of S. Florida (R. Weisberg), Fugro-GEOS/Ocean Numerics (D. Szabo, G. Evensen), Horizon Marine Inc. (J. Feeney, S. Anderson), ROFFS (M. Roffer), Orbimage (L. Stathoplos), Shell Oil Company (M. Vogel), ExxonMobil (O. Esenkov). | |
| Deepwater Program: The Archaeological and Biological Analysis of World War II Shipwrecks in the Gulf of Mexico: A Pilot Study of the Artificial Reef Effect in Deepwater This multidisciplinary study focused on the archaeological and biological aspects of the seven designated World War II era shipwrecks in the north-central portion of the Gulf of Mexico in water depths that ranged from 328 feet to 6,500 feet: the tanker Virginia (285 feet water depth), The tanker Halo (470 feet water depth), The tanker Gulfpenn (1820 feet water depth), the Steam Yacht Anona (4100 feet water depth), the German U-boat, U-166 (4780 feet water depth), The passenger freighter Robert E. Lee (4890 feet water depth) (Figure 1), and the Cargo Freighter Alcoa Puritan (6440 feet water depth). The long-term goals of this study were to determine the potential for man-made structures or objects to function as artificial reefs in deepwater and evaluate criteria to aid the federal government in managing these and other culturally significant deepwater sites. | |
| Development and Support for the USGODAE Server The USGODAE Monterey Data Server is envisioned as the hub for US (and international) GODAE projects. To meet this goal, the data server must fulfill three major roles. First, the server must act as a data server, providing reliable access to observational data and surface forcing fields to drive GODAE ocean models. Second, the server must be part of a framework to access and compare ocean model, or demonstration product output; so, researchers can validate and analyze their data. Finally, the server must have well-organized, easily accessible documentation to simplify data usage, and provide details for the many GODAE and US GODAE projects. | |
| Accelerating Electronic Tag Development for tracking Free-Ranging Marine Animals At Sea The Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP) program is pioneering the application of bio-logging science to study pelagic habitat use by marine vertebrates in the North Pacific. The program has four primary goals. First, develop methods and equipment necessary to implement large-scale, multi-institutional, multi-species electronic tagging programs. Second, improve basic knowledge of marine vertebrate predators and key processes linking them to their ocean environs. These data will ultimately be used to model the distributions of marine vertebrates and their habitats; information critical for management. Third, integrate environmental data collected by the tagged animals into global oceanographic databases for use in ocean observation, and model development. Fourth, build an education and outreach program to educate the public about the marine environment and its conservation. | |
| Acoustics in the Cetaceans' Environment: A Multimedia Educational Package The Macaulay Library is home to the world's largest collection of animal sounds, including a growing collection of marine sounds whose archival is funded by the Office of Naval Research. The Macaulay Library has an 80 year history of archiving sounds and using those sounds to educate and inform the public about biological diversity and animal communication. In the last few years, the Library has added video production to its public outreach functions. This project, for which we use the working title "Sea-of-Sound" is our most ambitious video outreach project to date. We are developing a documentary on use of sound in the marine environment, both natural and anthropogenic. While many people are aware that whales produce songs, clicks, and whistles, most don't know the extent to which marine mammals use sounds to communicate, survey their environment, and find food. More surprising to many is that the sea is alive with sounds of all kinds, from bubbles in breaking waves and rumbling undersea volcanoes, to croaking fish, snapping shrimp, and rasping mollusks. The general public has a poor understanding of how the behavior of sound in marine environments compares with our terrestrial world. They also know little about the critical role sound plays in marine research and marine mammal conservation. While there is increasing public concern over rising levels of anthropogenic noise in the marine environment, there is a lack of comprehensive, broadly disseminated information about sound in the sea. This makes it difficult for the public to make informed decisions about sound-related marine issues. Working with our partners we will be creating a DVD and website for classrooms and teachers, as well as the general public. These deliverables will be available in the third year of this project, the beginning of calendar year 2007. | |
| Radar-based Detection, Tracking and Speciation of Marine Mammals From Ships In addition to ship strikes, another cause of marine mammal injury and death is from exposure to high acoustic source levels, e.g., those encountered during Navy-sponsored Low Frequency Active (LFA) sonar tests. Irrespective of the method of mammal injury or death, the act of injuring or killing whales can and does result in litigation proceedings. This is a consequence of the legal protection that Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) are granted in U.S. waters by the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (as amended in 1994), with some species additionally protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Previously developed mitigation technologies, such as passive acoustic and visual observation, although promising, still fall significantly short of achieving the detection performance necessary to achieve full marine mammal mitigation. Radar surveillance technology, being developed under the current supported program, represents a fundamental paradigm shift and new approach toward the goal of achieving robust marine mammal mitigation. Figure 1 shows an example of two humpbacks detected at a range of 8 km. in both a high-powered EO telescope (right-panel) and in simultaneous, co-registered radar imagery (left-panel) during a prior funded cliff-based demonstration of this technology. The eventual long-term goal of this work, if successful under the baseline and option programs, is to develop and transition this new radar surveillance technology to both the military and commercial fleets. The primary benefit would be the mitigation of harmful effects on marine mammals due to acoustic testing and ship strikes. | |
| Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) The Multi-disciplinary Ocean Sensors for Environmental Analyses and Networks (MOSEAN) project has the long-term goal of developing and testing new technologies that will lead to increased observations that are essential for solving a variety of interdisciplinary oceanographic problems of societal importance. These include: biogeochemical cycling, climate change effects, ocean pollution, harmful algal blooms (HABs), ocean ecology, and underwater visibility. The collective MOSEAN sensors will be able to sample key variables that are vital to solve problems in nearshore to coastal to open ocean environments. | |
| Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperature (MISST) for GODAE The Multi-sensor Improved Sea Surface Temperatures (MISST) for the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) project intends to produce an improved, high-resolution, global, near-real-time (NRT), sea surface temperature analysis through the combination of satellite observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors and to then demonstrate the impact of these improved sea surface temperatures (SSTs) on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. SST is one of the most important variables related to the global ocean-atmosphere system. It is a key indicator for climate change and is widely applied to studies of upper ocean processes, to air-sea heat exchange, and as a boundary condition for numerical weather prediction. The importance of SST to accurate weather forecasting of both severe events and daily weather has been increasingly recognized over the past several years. Despite the importance and wide usage of operational SST analyses, significant weaknesses remain in the existing operational products. The improved sensors on the Terra, Aqua, and EnviSAT-1 satellites, in conjunction with previously existing sensors on several other US Navy, NASA, and NOAA satellites, provide the opportunity for notable advances in SST measurement. In addition to more frequent coverage for increased temporal resolution, these sensors permit the combination of highly complementary IR and MW retrievals. While clouds, aerosols, and atmospheric water vapor affect IR retrievals, these phenomena have little impact on MW retrievals. Characteristically, IR SST provides high spatial resolution (~1 km at nadir) but poorer coverage with the presence of clouds. Although having a reduce resolution (~25 km grid), MW SST provide >90% coverage of the global ocean each day. These factors have motivated interest in the development of merged IR and MW SST products to leverage the positive characteristics of each sensor type. Merging multiple SST sensors into a single analysis will result in enhanced reliability, availability, and accuracy. This project has two distinct goals: (1) producing an improved sea surface temperature (SST) product through the combination of observations from complementary infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sensors, and (2) demonstrating the impact of improved multi-sensor SST products on operational ocean models, numerical weather prediction, and tropical cyclone intensity forecasting. Close collaboration and the international coordinated exchange of SST products with error statistics with operational agencies will optimize utility of these new data streams by US and international operational agencies. Innovative techniques to blend these complementary data will be applied in operational frameworks at NOAA and Navy. This project will make a direct US contribution to the Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment (GODAE) by working within the GODAE High-Resolution SST Pilot Project (GHRSST-PP), initiated by the international GODAE steering team, to coordinate the production of a new generation high-resolution SST. By contributing to the GHRSST-PP this team will minimize duplication of efforts, harmonize research and development activities, and maximize data access. Consolidation of the numerous SST data products into optimal, easily accessible, new generation products shared by the US and international community, will be particularly valuable as it will maximize the synergy benefits of previously unavailable combined IR and MW SST products. This effort will ensure that US scientists and operational activities remain at the forefront of the international ocean and weather forecasting activities and are provided with state-of-the-art SST data products and analyses. | |
| Developing Gene-Based Remote Detection We seek to improve coastal water quality monitoring and ecological forecasting by incorporating the advantages of molecular biology into autonomous biosensors. Such "next generation" sensors will greatly enhance the power of ocean observing systems by relaying species-specific information in conjunction with more traditional environmental measurements. The biosensors will identify and quantify microbial species including harmful algae, fecal indicator bacteria, and human pathogens by electrochemical detection of nucleic acids (DNA or RNA). Autonomous, remote detection of biologics is needed to meet needs of natural resource management and the oceanographic and ecological sciences. This type of technology development also has relevance to medical and homeland security applications. | |
| Real-Time Forecasting System of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goal of this partnership is to establish an operational forecasting system of the wind field and resulting waves and surge impacting the coastline during the approach and landfall of tropical cyclones. The results of this forecasting system would provide real-time information to the National Hurricane Center during the tropical cyclone season in the Atlantic for establishing improved advisories for the general public and federal agencies including military and civil emergency response teams. | |
| Visualizing Cetacean Auditory Responses to Underwater Noise The objective of this task is to create three-dimensional interactive simulations of sound propagation and impacts from both impulse and continuous sound sources. The visualizations will be driven by anatomical and simulation data provided by the Woods Hole Institute (WHOI) and BU (Boston University). This effort will extend prior research by using new visualization tools to model the both the auditory system, and the salient aspects of the skull and jaw involved in focusing incoming sound. The frames for rendered movies will be generated using finite element models. The NRL team will assemble the frames and create a three-dimensional movie linked to predictive models for the behavior of the auditory system. The movie can be displayed using an interactive three-dimensional display, as well as on a desktop workstation. During the second year of research, NRL will attempt to prototype a web-based implementation of the volume rendering techniques developed in year 1. | |
| HYCOM Consortium for Data-Assimilative Ocean Modeling Make HYCOM (HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model) a state of the art community ocean model with data assimilation capability that can (1) be used in a wide range of ocean-related research, (2) be used in a next generation eddy-resolving global ocean prediction system and (3) be coupled to a variety of other models, including littoral, atmospheric, ice and bio-chemical. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction with the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model Use the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) with data assimilation in an eddy-resolving, fully global ocean prediction system with transition to the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVOCEANO) at .08º equatorial (~7 km mid-latitude) resolution in 2007 and .04º resolution by 2011. The model will include shallow water to a minimum depth of 5 m and provide boundary conditions to finer resolution coastal and regional models that may use HYCOM or a different model. In addition, HYCOM will be coupled to atmospheric, ice and bio-chemical models, with transition to the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) for the coupled ocean-atmosphere prediction. | |
| Measuring the behavior and response to sound of beaked whales using recording tags The goals of this project are to understand the reasons for, and to help to reduce, the strandings of two little-known species of beaked whales related to mid-frequency navy sonars. Although they are widely distributed, these cryptic species have proven extremely difficult to study and, until recently, almost nothing was known about their sub-surface behavior or vocalizations. The current project combines an advanced acoustic and orientation recording tag with methods of visual survey, photo-identification and habitat characterization in proven productive field sites. Using these tools, we aim to provide a thorough characterization of the movement patterns, vocalizations, foraging styles, and preferred habitat of the two species. The resulting baseline data will greatly expand our understanding of these animals and of the deep prey on which they feed, both of which are poorly understood. Understanding of these factors is critical to designing, and evaluating the success of, any mitigation measure. Results from the study are directed at two strategies to reduce beaked whale mortality: first, with a specification of how and when these animals vocalize, it may be possible to develop systems for passive acoustic detection of beaked whales. Since beaked whales are so difficult to sight, acoustic detection is a critical method to monitor for the presence of these sensitive species before and during sonar trials. The second, longer-term strategy is to determine what factors heighten the risk of stranding and to identify opportunities to minimize these. If risk assessments continue to highlight an urgent need to define safe exposure limits for beaked whales, we propose to plan a pilot study on the behavioral responses of beaked whales to low levels of sonar-like sounds. Recognizing that research priorities may change as new data come to light, we will work with an international community of stakeholders to evaluate new opportunities. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Puget Sound, Washington, is both the largest fjord in the lower forty-eight states and closest to the substantial urban centers of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and surrounding communities. The sound has seasonally high annual phytoplankton standing stock and primary production, and they support several economically valuable fisheries. Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the Sound's circulation and marine ecosystem, and of the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations; and to develop models of Puget Sound that can aid agencies with responsibilities for environmental management in making informed decisions and serve as marine science education tools. | |
| Estimating the Economic Benefits of Regional Ocean Observing Systems This report summarizes the findings of a preliminary investigation of the magnitude of potential economic benefits that can be realized by deploying a network of ocean observing systems throughout the coastal waters of the United States. Such a network is currently being developed through collaborative efforts of federal, state, and local governments, universities, and organizations in both the non-profit and for-profit sectors. | |
| A NOPP Partnership for Skin Sea-Surface Temperature Sea surface temperature (SST) is an important parameter in many operational and research activities, ranging from weather forecasting to climate research. The goals of this project are to demonstrate the use of autonomous infrared radiometers that measure the skin SST to absolute accuracies that are useful for the validation of global SST fields derived from measurements on earth-observation satellites, to use these measurements to determine the accuracies of such remotely-sensed SSTs, and to demonstrate the use of skin SSTs in forecast models. | |
| Surface Circulation Radar Mapping in Alaskan Coastal Waters: Field Study Beaufort Sea and Cook Inlet Our primary goal with this project is to obtain spatial and temporal surface circulation fields for a portion of lower Cook Inlet and the central Beaufort Sea shelf in the vicinity of offshore oil production. These measurements will contribute to the baseline oceanography of two regions where few in situ current measurements have been made, and will therefore help to promote the general understanding of surface currents in these areas. These investigations will be an important undertaking for the Minerals Management Service (MMS) future efforts to model potential oil spills and for possible spill response and oil spill contingency planning. The data can also be used by MMS for model comparison and validation, for both hydrodynamic models as well as general circulation models. By disseminating the data over the internet in real-time, these data will assist professional users with a need for information for ship tracking and touring, coastal zone management, sediment transport, search and rescue operations, oil spill and other pollutant response. | |
| An Integrated Coastal Wireless Network: 2004 End-of-Year Interim Report The goal of this study is to define a wireless network architecture that can be deployed to enable contiguous coastal area network coverage for scientific, commercial, and homeland security (e.g. Coast Guard) applications within the United States Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), in a manner that is flexible, manageable, and affordable. As described in Reference 1, we intend to determine the architectural requirements of such a system, delineate suitable technologies that will achieve such a vision, and provide a plan to demonstrate the concept. | |
| A Digital Archive of Marine Mammal/Bird/Turtle Data for OBIS The goal of the digital archive project is to create and arrange for the sustainability of the marine mammal, seabird, and turtle components of the Ocean Biogeographic Information System (OBIS) of the Census of Marine Life, in cooperation with the National Ocean Partnership Program. This database will have a global coverage, including the Pacific, Atlantic, and Antarctic Oceans, and will contain data from long-term observations. All these data will be freely and publicly available through a user-friendly, web-based system designed to make data easily accessible to a broad variety of users with wide abilities and backgrounds, ranging from research scientists to the public at large. | |
| Standardization of Electrophysiological Measures of Hearing in Marine Mammals The primary goal of this project is to develop the technology and methods required to make quantitative, repeatable, and interpretable measurements of pinniped hearing sensitivity using averaged evoked potentials recorded from the surface of the head. This effort will advance understanding of marine mammal auditory physiology and provide tools necessary for the study of population-level and species-level hearing so that noise impacts in marine ecosystems can be better understood. | |
| Incorporation of Sensors into Autonomous Gliders for 4-D Measurement of Bio-optical and Chemical Our long-term goal is to develop distributed networks of autonomous underwater gliders that are capable of providing a detailed, four-dimensional view of ocean biology, chemistry and physics for extended periods of time. Gliders are flexible in that they can operate completely autonomously in either station-keeping or transect modes of operation, or accept new commands from shore during a mission to change observing strategies. Their range can be several thousand kilometers with mission durations of many months. The sensors are small and low power, and capable of measuring key biological, chemical and physical variables. The capabilities enabled through the successes of our NOPP project are important steps toward our long-term goal of developing affordable sensing networks for basic science, for sustained ocean observing, and for applied studies of relevance to national needs. | |
| Float Technology Development It is the long-term goal of the principal investigators of this grant to develop profiling floats with expanded capabilities in terms of better sensors, communications methods, greater operating depths, and ice capability. | |
| The Argo Project Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 3 of the 5-year project, and builds on progress made by previous awards (Phases 1 and 2) for pilot float arrays and data system development. By the end of 2006, Argo will have deployed a global array of 3000 profiling CTD floats (Roemmich and Owens, 2000, Roemmich et al, 2002, Gould, 2004), and established a data system to meet the needs of both operational and scientific users for data delivery in real time and delayed mode. The Argo array will provide unprecedented views of the evolving physical state of the ocean. It will reveal the physical processes that balance the large-scale heat and freshwater budgets of the ocean and will provide a crucial dataset for initialization of and assimilation in seasonal-to-decadal forecast models. Argo is a major initiative in oceanography, with research and operational objectives, providing a global dataset for climate science and other applications. It is a pilot project of the Global Ocean Observing System. | |
| PARADIGM: The Partnership for Advancing Interdisciplinary Global Modeling To develop an efficient, community-based coupled biogeochemical-physical modeling framework that will enable the addition of new oceanographic processes in a straightforward and transparent manner, allowing new model structures to be developed and explored as our understanding of ocean ecology and biogeochemistry improves. To develop such a modeling framework within the context of our initial, specific overarching scientific focus: an inter-comparison study between the subtropical-subpolar gyre systems of the North Pacific and North Atlantic basins, including an explicit coastal component, with particular emphasis on understanding: new paradigms for physical and chemical control of plankton community structure and function; the consequences for biogeochemical cycling; the effects of sub-mesoscale and mesoscale forcing; and the dynamics of long-term, climate driven ecosystem regime shifts. To meet the challenge of merging observations and models through: advanced data assimilation techniques; the development of interdisciplinary data products for incorporation into models; and the application of new statistical and complex dynamical systems analysis techniques. The merging of observations and models supports a rigorous model validation program that is central to PARADIGM. | |
| The Environmental Sample Processor (ESP): A Device for Detecting Microoganisms In Situ Using Molecular Probe Technology Molecular diagnostic procedures for identifying water borne microorganisms, genes they may harbor and express, and toxins they may produce play a central role in many research and resource management activities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, but such methods generally require the return of discrete samples to a laboratory for analysis. The long-term goal of this project is to develop an in situ instrument system that allows us to overcome this impediment. Towards that end we are exploring use of and further developing the Environmental Sample Processor (ESP), a novel instrument that collects discrete, subsurface water samples remotely and utilizes molecular probe technology to detect a wide range of microorganisms and substances they produce. We aim to deploy an array of internet-accessible ESP's and carry out a variety of "wet-chemistry" molecular biological analyses in support of basic environmental research and resource management activities, such as those consistent with a variety of ocean and water shed observing initiatives (e.g., OOI/ORION, IOOS, GOOS, NEON, GEOHAB, OHH, etc.) | |
| HYCOM Consortium for Data Assimilative Modeling The goal of the project is to make HYCOM (HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model) a state of the art community ocean model with data assimilation capability of sea surface height from altimetry, sea surface temperature from MCSST and in-situ data. The ultimate goal is to have an eddy-resolving assimilative fully global nowcast/forecast system running in real time that will provide boundary conditions to a variety of higher resolution coastal models. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington - Ocean Inquiry Project Report Puget Sound, Washington, is both the largest fjord in the lower forty-eight states and closest to the substantial urban centers of Seattle, Tacoma, Everett and surrounding communities. The Sound has seasonally high annual phytoplankton standing stock and primary production, and they support several economically valuable fisheries. Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the Sound's circulation and marine ecosystem, and of the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations; and to develop models of Puget Sound that can aid agencies with responsibilities for environmental management in making informed decisions and serve as marine science education tools. | |
| A Consortium For Ocean Circulation And Climate Estimation The project aims to advance ocean data assimilation into a quasi-operational tool for studying ocean circulation. Observing the complete state of the ocean is difficult owing to its turbulent nature and to the sparseness and limitation of extant measurements. This project will establish a routine description of the global ocean by optimally combining available observations using a general circulation model, to monitor, to assess, and to understand ocean circulation. The effort further aims to demonstrate the practical utility of ocean observing systems by developing applications of such syntheses. | |
| U. S. GODAE: Sustained Global Ocean State Estimation for Scientific and Practical Application This consortium project aims to advance ocean state estimation as a practical, quasi-operational tool, for studying the ocean circulation and its influence on societal problems such as climate change, sea level rise, and biological impacts. Observing the ocean is difficult owing to its turbulent nature and enormous range of energetic spatial scales. This project, building upon earlier experience, is establishing the means by which a quantitative description of the global ocean will be routinely and continuously available. The methodology employs state-of-the-art general circulation models, statistical estimation techniques, and the complete range of available oceanic observations including, particularly, global satellite data, as well as in situ observations of all kinds. The effort includes further demonstration of the practical utility of ocean observing systems through their use in important scientific goals. | |
Fiscal Year 2003 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| Development and Verification of a Comprehensive Community Model for Physical Processes in the Nearshore Ocean The basic scientific objective is to synthesize understanding of physical processes in the nearshore ocean by developing a model for waves and resulting radiation stresses and mass fluxes over evolving coastal bathymetry and currents, wave-induced circulation, and sediment transport and morphological evolution. | |
| Accelerating Electronic Tag Development for tracking Free-Ranging Marine Animals At Sea Refine and develop electronic tagging technologies for Tagging of Pacific Pelagics (TOPP), a pilot program of the Census of Marine Life (CoML). The tags under development will enable the project to address more complex questions about marine predators and their environment and collect high quality environmental data for integration into oceanographic databases | |
| Operational Utilization of High Resolution Ocean Surface Wind Vectors (25km or better) in the Marine Forecasting Environment The work proposed here seeks to exploit currently and soon to be available satellite ocean surface vector wind data in the operational weather forecasting environment. This work will build upon an ongoing effort to quantify the impacts of QuikSCAT ocean vector wind data in the operational short-term warnings and forecasts issued by the NWS Ocean Prediction Center. | |
| U.S. GODAE: Global Ocean Prediction With The Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM) A broad partnership of institutions is collaborating in developing and demonstrating the performance and application of eddy-resolving, real-time global and basin-scale ocean prediction systems using the HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model (HYCOM). | |
| HYCOM Consortium For Data Assimilative Ocean Modeling Development of a consortium for hybrid-coordinate data assimilative ocean modeling to make HYCOM (HYbrid Coordinate Ocean Model) a state of the art community ocean model with data assimilation capability that can (1) be used in a wide range of ocean-related research, (2) be used in a next generation eddy-resolving global ocean prediction system and (3) be coupled to a variety of other models, including littoral, atmospheric, ice and bio-chemical. | |
| Modeling the Central California Coastal Upwelling System: Physics, Ecosystems and Resource Management 1. To develop better methods for management and protection of the California coast ecosystem as a valuable natural resource. 2. To better understand the physical and biogeochemical dynamics of the California coastal upwelling system and how it responds to changes in local and large-scale atmospheric forcing, and global change. | |
| Development of an Integrated Regional, National and International Data System for Oceanography The long-term goal is the implementation of a network based system that would provide for the discovery of and seamless access to oceanographic data. The ultimate goal is a system that will provide immediate access to a vast array of real-time and historical oceanographic archives by all segments of the oceanographic community from the one-time user to the modelers and managers requiring regular and automatic ingestion of the highest quality data and data products. | |
| A Consortium for Ocean Circulation and Climate Estimation The project aims to advance ocean data assimilation into a quasi-operational tool for studying ocean circulation. | |
| Real-Time Forecasting System of Winds, Waves and Surge in Tropical Cyclones The long-term goal of this partnership is to establish an operational forecasting system of the wind field and resulting waves and surge impacting the coastline during the approach and landfall of tropical cyclones. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the Sound's circulation and marine ecosystem, and of the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations; and to develop models of Puget Sound that can aid agencies with responsibilities for environmental management in making informed decisions and serve as marine science education tools. | |
| Coordinated Regional Benefit Studies of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems The long-term goal supported by this project is the development and sustained support of coastal ocean observing systems for the waters of the United States. | |
| Establishing a NOAA Operational Data Center for Surface Currents Derived from Satellite Altimeters and Scatterometers; Pilot Study for the Tropical Pacific Including the Hawaiian Islands and US Territorial Islands This project is developing a processing system and data center to provide operational ocean surface velocity fields from satellite altimeter and vector wind data for a variety of uses, including large scale climate diagnostics and prediction as well as fisheries management and recruitment, monitoring debris drift, larvae drift, oil spills, fronts and eddies. | |
| Limited Area Coastal Ocean Models: Assimilation of Observations from Fixed Platforms on the Continental Shelf and Far-Field Forcing from Open Ocean Models The goal of this project is to build an operational system for forecasting of the coastal ocean over a limited area, and to demonstrate and test its capabilities. | |
| Renewal of SABSOON The long-term objective for SABSOON is to function both as component of a regional coastal ocean observing system, and as a coastal ocean observatory, providing distributed real-time observations and time series records of coastal ocean conditions, hosting specific projects and serving as a test bed for development of new sensor systems. | |
| Scatterometer-Derived Operational Winds and Surface Pressures Enhanced products based on satellite-derived ocean surface winds will be distributed to Navy and commercial vessels, and civilian forecasters, with improved accuracy and much greater ease of interpretation. | |
| Incorporation of Sensors into Autonomous Gliders for 4-D Measurement of Bio-optical and Chemical Our long-term goal is to develop distributed networks of autonomous underwater gliders that are capable of providing a detailed, four-dimensional view of ocean biology, chemistry and physics for extended periods of time. | |
| Application of an Integrated Monitoring and Modeling System to Narragansett Bay and Adjacent Waters incorporating Internet-Based-Technology The long term goal of this initiative is to develop a globally re-locatable, integrated system for real time observation, modeling, and data distribution for shelf, coastal sea, and estuarine waters. | |
| A Digital Archive of Marine Mammal / Bird / Turtle Data for OBIS The goal of the digital archive project is to create and arrange for the sustainability of the marine mammal, seabird, and turtle components of the ocean biogeographic information system of the Census of Marine Life, in cooperation with the National Ocean Partnership Program. | |
| Float Technology Development It is the long-term goal of the principal investigators of this grant to develop profiling floats with expanded capabilities in terms of better sensors, communications methods, greater operating depths, and ice capability. | |
| The Argo Project: Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. The present report covers Year 2 of the 5-year project, and builds on progress made by previous awards (Phases 1 and 2) for pilot float arrays and data system development. | |
| PARADIGM: The Partnership for Advancing Interdisciplinary Global Modeling To develop an efficient, community-based coupled biogeochemical-physical modeling framework that will enable the addition of new oceanographic processes in a straightforward and transparent manner, allowing new model structures to be developed and explored as our understanding of ocean ecology and biogeochemistry improves. | |
| Long Term Surface Salinity Measurements Our long-term goal is to establish a reliable system for monitoring surface salinity around the global ocean. Salinity has a great influence on air-sea interaction and is believed to have potential for improving climate forecasts if an observation system can be developed. | |
| Develop a Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model with Data Assimilation Capabilities To develop data-assimilating capability for HYCOM, the hybrid-coordinate version of University of Miami's Isopycnic Coordinate Ocean Model. | |
Fiscal Year 2002 Reports || Year: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || Author: 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 || | |
| ZooGene, a DNA sequence database for calanoid copepods and euphausiids: an OBIS tool for uniform standards of species identification An international partnership will be established to develop a zooplankton genomic (ZooGene) database of DNA type sequences for calanoid copepods and euphausiids. | |
| Operational Utilization of High Resolution Ocean Surface Wind Vectors (25km or better) in the Marine Forecasting Environment The work proposed here seeks to exploit currently and soon to be available satellite ocean surface vector wind data in the operational weather forecasting environment. | |
| HYCOM Consortium For Data Assimilative Ocean Modeling Development of a consortium for hybrid-coordinate data assimilative ocean modeling, which will be ready in 2003 to address both the US-GODAE (Global Ocean Data Assimilation Experiment) principal objective, i.e., the depiction of the three-dimensional ocean state at fine resolution in near-real time, and the climate modeling objective of producing an unbiased estimate of the state of the ocean at coarse resolution for long-term climate variability research. | |
| HYCOM Data Assimilation And Web Outreach Implementation of an Information System that allows easy access to observational data and model output to (a) to members of the HYCOM consortium and for data assimilation code development, (b) the wider oceanographic and scientific communities, including climate and ecosystem researchers, and (c) the general public especially students in elementary and high schools. | |
| Modeling the Central California Coastal Upwelling System: Physics, Ecosystems and Resource Management 1. To develop better methods for management and protection of the California coast ecosystem as a valuable natural resource. 2. To better understand the physical and biogeochemical dynamics of the California coastal upwelling system and how it responds to changes in local and large-scale atmospheric forcing, and global change. | |
| Enhancing K-12 Science Education Via Satellite-televised Interactive Technologies To support of the goals of the NOPP Education, Outreach, and Training activities by providing a telepresence for science education and developing K-12 marine science curriculum and supplemental activities. | |
| Development of an Autonomous Sampling Network for Plankton, Hydrography and Currents. Phase I. Incorporation of Plankton Imaging Capability into Autonomous Underwater Vehicles In the present project we are developing an autonomous high-resolution sampler by merging plankton-imaging technology with autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) technology. | |
| A Proposal to Assess and Expand the COOL Classroom: A Web Site to Bring Real-time data from the Long-term Ecosystem Observatory (LEO) to 6-12 Grade Classrooms The COOL Classroom is envisioned as an application of oceanographic research related to ocean observing systems for middle and high school students and teachers. | |
| A Renewal of the Ocean-Systems for Chemical, Optical, and Physical Experiments (O-SCOPE) Program The overall goal of the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP) sponsored Ocean-Systems for Chemical, Optical, and Physical Experiments (O-SCOPE) project is to develop instrumentation to enable next-generation, autonomous, near real-time, nearly continuous, longterm, interdisciplinary, time-series measurements in critical regions of the world ocean. | |
| Ocean Response Coastal Analysis System (ORCAS) Our long-term goal is to develop instrument systems for coherent, real-time monitoring of finescale biological, physical, chemical, and optical structure and processes within the ocean, in 3-dimensional space and time. | |
| Census of Marine Fishes (CMF): Definitive List of Species and Online Biodiversity Database The primary goal of the project was to advance the Oceanic Biogeographical Information System (OBIS) for the Census of Marine Life with respect to marine fishes. | |
| Biogeoinformatics of Hexacorallia (Corals, Sea Anemones, and their Allies): Interfacing Geospatial, Taxonomic, and Environmental Data for a Group of Marine Invertebrates We are creating an easy-to-understand data source for 1) taxonomic and distributional information about hexacorallian animals (corals, sea anemones, and their kin) and 2) relevant environmental parameters. | |
| Completion and Field Demonstration of a Portable Coastal Observatory The goal of this project is to complete the development and field demonstration of an affordable, easy to use technology for the real time collection and dissemination of data from instruments deployed in the coastal ocean. | |
| A Consortium for Ocean Circulation and Climate Estimation The project's goal is to advance ocean data assimilation into a quasi-operational tool for studying ocean circulation. | |
| Coastal Ocean Modeling and Observation Program The long-term goal of our coordinated ONR (COMOP-II/HyCODE) and NOPP research efforts is the development and validation of a relocatable coastal ocean forecasting system. | |
| HYCOM Consortium for Data-assimilative Ocean Modeling Make HYCOM (Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model) a state of the art community ocean model with data assimilation capability that can (1) be used in a wide range of ocean-related research, (2) be used in a next generation eddy-resolving global ocean prediction system and (3) be coupled to a variety of other models, including littoral, atmospheric, ice and bio-chemical. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington - Puget Sound Naval Shipyard Report Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the seasonal and longer time-scale variabilities of the Sound's circulation, roles of water column stratification, nutrients, and light (and their interactions) on phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics, and the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations. | |
| A Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the seasonal and longer time-scale variabilities of the Sound's circulation, roles of water column stratification, nutrients, and light (and their interactions) on phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics, and the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations. | |
| The Gulf of Maine Biogeographic Information System (GMBIS) Project The fundamental objectives of the GMBIS project are to develop a generic technical framework for marine biogeographic information systems assembly and an associated set of reusable software tools in support of the Census of Marine Life program (CoML) and its information management component, OBIS. | |
| Development and Verification of a Comprehensive Community Model for Physical Processes in the Nearshore Ocean Our goal is to develop a comprehensive, verified community model that predicts nearshore hydrodynamics, sediment transport, and seabed morphology changes given offshore wave conditions and initial bathymetry. | |
| Coordinated Regional Benefit Studies of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems The long-term goal supported by this project is the development and sustained support of coastal ocean observing systems for the waters of the United States. | |
| Establishing a NOAA Operational Data Center for Surface Currents Derived from Satellite Altimeters and Scatterometers; Pilot Study for the Tropical Pacific Including the Hawaiian Islands and US Territorial Islands This project, which now has a working name OSCAR (Ocean Surface Currents Analysis Realtime), develops a processing system and data center to provide operational ocean surface velocity fields from satellite altimeter and vector wind data. | |
| Bridge: Ocean Science Education Teacher Resource Center The Bridge (www.marine-ed.org/bridge) is a focused web portal site for ocean sciences education resources. | |
| A Consortium for Ocean Circulation and Climate Estimation | |
| Renewal of SABSOON The long-term objective for SABSOON is to function both as component of a regional coastal ocean observing system, and as a coastal ocean observatory. | |
| Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the seasonal and longer time-scale variabilities of the Sound's circulation, roles of water column stratification, nutrients, and light (and their interactions) on phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics, and the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations. | |
| Scatterometer-Derived Operational Winds and Surface Pressures Enhanced products based on satellite-derived ocean surface winds will be distributed to Navy and commercial vessels, and civilian forecasters, with improved accuracy and much greater ease of interpretation. | |
| Front Resolving Observational Network with Telemetry (FRONT) The Front Resolving Observational Network with Telemetry (FRONT) experiment is designed to evaluate the feasibility of making useful coastal ocean forecasts with a coarse array of instruments that telemeter data in near-real time for use in an assimilative numerical model. | |
| Innovative Coastal-Ocean Observing Network (ICON) Renewal The Innovative Coastal-Ocean Observing Network (ICON) is a partnership of government, academic, and industrial entities funded by the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP). Its goal is to bring together modern measurement technologies, to develop new technologies, and to integrate them within a data assimilating coastal ocean circulation model. | |
| Incorporation of Sensors into Autonomous Gliders for 4-D Measurement of Bio-optical and Chemical Our long-term goal is to develop an autonomous underwater glider that will be useful and affordable for basic oceanographic science and for applied studies, and that will be capable of providing a detailed, four-dimensional view of ocean biology, chemistry and physics for extended periods of time. | |
| Application of an Integrated Monitoring and Modeling System to Narragansett Bay and Adjacent Waters Incorporating Internet Based Technology Within the overall context of this initiative the Drexel/URI lead partnership proposes to develop a globally re-locatable, integrated system for real time observation, modeling, and data distribution for shelf, coastal sea, and estuarine waters. | |
| Seaweb Network for FRONT Oceanographic Sensors Our goal is to accomplish data telemetry and remote control for a set of widely spaced oceanographic sensors by using through-water acoustic signaling (telesonar) to form an undersea wireless network (Seaweb). | |
| The Argo Project: Global Ocean Observations for Understanding and Prediction of Climate Variability The U.S. component of the international Argo Project (http://www.argo.ucsd.edu) is implemented through this award. | |
| PARADIGM: The Partnership for Advancing Interdisciplinary Global Modeling To develop an efficient, community-based coupled biogeochemical-physical modeling framework that will enable the addition of new oceanographic processes in a straightforward and transparent manner, allowing new model structures to be developed and explored as our understanding of ocean ecology and biogeochemistry improves. | |
| Long Term Surface Salinity Measurements Our long-term goal is to establish a reliable system for monitoring surface salinity around the global ocean. | |
| Planning for a National Community Sediment Transport Model The long-term goal of our research is to improve our understanding and ability to predict the transport, transformation, and fate of sediment and particle-bound nutrients and contaminants. | |
| Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the seasonal and longer time-scale variabilities of the Sound's circulation, roles of water column stratification, nutrients, and light (and their interactions) on phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics, and the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations. | |
| HYCOM Consortium for Data Assimilative Modeling The goal of the project is to make HYCOM (Hybrid Coordinate Ocean Model) a state of the art community ocean model with data assimilation capability of sea surface height from altimetry, sea surface temperature from MCSST and in-situ data. | |
| Partnership for Modeling the Marine Environment of Puget Sound, Washington Our long-term goals are to develop quantitative understanding of the seasonal and longer time-scale variability of the Sound's circulation, roles of water column stratification, nutrients, and light (and their interactions) on phytoplankton and zooplankton dynamics, and the sensitivity of the physical and the biological system to natural and human perturbations. | |
| A Consortium For Ocean Circulation And Climate Estimation To bring, in the collaborative ECCO effort together with groups at JPL and MIT, ocean state estimation from its current experimental status to a practical and quasi-operational tool for studying large-scale ocean dynamics, designing observational strategies and examining the ocean's role in climate variability. | |
| Diel, seasonal, and interannual patterns in zooplankton and micronekton species composition in the subtropical Atlantic To provide a unique data set for use in the Ocean Biogeographical Information System (OBIS) - over a decade of monthly zooplankton and micronekton species composition data from the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS) site in the Sargasso Sea. | |
| Ocean Response Coastal Analysis System The joint goal of the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and the Commander, Meteorology and Oceanography Command (CNMOC) is to develop a capability to describe diver visibility and vulnerability, and demonstrate how new, innovative technology allows a better 3D/4D representation of the optical field for Navy applications. | |
| The FishNet Distributed Information System FishNet is designed as a distributed information system to furnish biodiversity information from natural history museums to anyone with Internet access. The goals were to demonstrate that this could be accomplished, if the data could be served in a consistent and timely manner, and to demonstrate that the data could be used to conduct significant scientific research. | |
| Expansion of CephBase as a Biological Prototype for OBIS CephBase is a dynamic relational database-driven web site. The purpose of CephBase is to provide taxonomic data, life history, distribution, images, videos, references and scientific contact information on all living species of cephalopods (octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus) in an easy to access, user-friendly manner. | |