Development of a Shelf-Wide Ocean Observatory in the Mid-Atlantic Bight

Currently a shelf-wide ocean observatory is being constructed to characterize the physical forcing of continental shelf primary productivity in the New York Bight (NYB). This proposal will expand the existing 30 x 30 km research space of the existing Lon-term Ecosystem Observatory (LEO) coastal ocean observatory to 300 x 300 km in order to characterize relevant spatial and temporal biogeochemical scales. The shelf observatory will consist of (1) long-range CODAR surface currents, (2) the international constellation of ocean color satellites, (3) physical/bio-optical cabled observatories, and (4) subsurface autonomonous underwater vehicles. Operation of the observatory will be through a centralized computer network dedicated to receiving, processing and visualizing the real-time data and disseminating results to both field scientists and ocean forecasters over the World Wide Web. The observation data-stream is assimilated into the new generation ocean forecast models providing a means to adaptively sample episodic events on the shlef. All components of the observatory were tested during the ONR-Sponsored HyCODE/COMOP Coastal Predictive Skill Experiments during the summer of 2000 and 2001. The shelf-wide system will be a central component of the NorthEast Observatory System (NEOS), which is a consortium of the major academic oceanographic institutions from Virginia to Maine.