Intellectual Merit

The CBEO will be developed by a team of highly qualified computer scientists, marine scientists and environmental engineers who already have a track record of working together on environmental observatory projects and complex cross-discipline research efforts. We appreciate the power of blending CI and domain science to produce new and exciting scientific insights and engineering tools. The CI will produce a joining of disparate and incommensurable Chesapeake Bay data sets, a valuable and important contribution, as demonstrated by the success of the National Virtual Observatory. However, there is much more to be gained.

We will provide new interpolation and analysis tools, linked to available visualization software, that can take advantage of the multiple variables and types of data in the 5D joined set. The availability of 15 years of fine-grained hydrodynamic flow and transport information will be used to developed velocity-directed interpolation functions that will greatly expand the utility of the less dense observations. Developing analysis functions that can compute source terms from state variable observations, e.g., nutrient uptake rates corrected for transport losses; volumes of iso-surfaces, e.g., hypoxic water volume progression and duration; and fluxes across planes, e.g. organic matter export from the shallow regions of the Bay, will provide new and heretofore unavailable windows into the workings of the Bay in general and the mechanisms of hypoxia generation in particular. The prospect of converting the available vast and mostly unexamined observational and modeling data resources excites and motivates us to pursue the CBEO.