The Design and Application of a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory
Abstract
The Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is a prototypical observatory funded by the 2005 NSF program on “Cyberinfrastructure for Environmental Observatories: Prototype Systems to Address Cross-Cutting Needs (CEO:P).” For the past three years, our multi-institutional team of estuary and hydrologic scientists, environmental engineers, computer scientists, and educators has designed and built the CBEO infrastructure with an inter-disciplinary approach that integrates four parallel efforts: Network, Education, Testbed, and Science. In this project, we have used a major science question to drive cyberinfrastructure (CI) development, under the assumption that data collection, testbed structure, educational tools, and other aspects of CI can be more appropriately and efficiently designed if driven by specific science questions. The major question chosen for evaluation relates to historical hypoxia trends in the Bay. In particular, the project seeks to better understand why reduction in nutrient loads over the past few decades have apparently not resulted in reduced “hypoxic volume” (volume of Bay water with dissolved oxygen below specified criteria - e.g., 1.0 mg/L). These trends are in contrast to expectations based on decades of research that show a clear impact of excessive nutrient fluxes on algal blooms and depletion of dissolved oxygen in bottom waters. To fully investigate the reasons for this recent “regime shift” in Bay responses to management, the CBEO team required better access to multiple long-term observational datasets, new access to past modeling results (i.e., model output data from decades of calibration and simulation work), new predictive model runs, and new tools for data analysis. The breadth and depth of data and tools required has made hypoxia research in the Chesapeake Bay an ideal application for CI. In building the CBEO testbed and CI, the project team has collaborated with the Chesapeake Bay Program, multiple state environmental agencies, other academic teams doing Bay research, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to obtain 60 years of observational data on the Bay as well as model output data from over 20 years of watershed, hydrodynamic and water quality modeling. We have used the combination of observational and model data sets to address a number of specific hypotheses related to the overall science question. For example, one specific project focused on better quantifying the hypoxic volume through incorporation of model output into better spatial interpolation of observations. Other projects have focused on the testing of various hypotheses for the recent observational trends, including analysis of decadal scale trends in Bay salinity and stratification as well as evaluations of benthic macrofauna and nutrient cycling in the Bay. Overall, our efforts have led to some important new findings about hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay while also guiding the development of comprehensive, useful CI for use in environmental observatories.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2009
- Bibcode:
- 2009AGUFM.H51H0859B
- Keywords:
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- 0470 BIOGEOSCIENCES / Nutrients and nutrient cycling;
- 0845 EDUCATION / Instructional tools;
- 1871 HYDROLOGY / Surface water quality;
- 1908 INFORMATICS / Cyberinfrastructure