Regional
and Coastal Environmental Research:
Regional
and coastal environmental problems have been
a focus of AOML activities for more than two
decades. Prior major interdisciplinary, multi-institutional
efforts have included inter alia: Nutrient Enhanced
Coastal Ocean Productivity; New York Bight Study
and a series of fisheries oceanography-related
studies (Fisheries Oceanography Cooperative
Investigations, South Atlantic Bight Recruitment
Experiment, Southeast Florida and Caribbean
Recruitment). At present, our principal field
efforts range from physical, biological, and
chemical studies related to South Florida Ecosystem
Restoration (SFER) and the underlying health
of this ecosystem to the regional Intra-Americas
Sea and the status and health of coral reef
ecosystems worldwide. At the same time, we are
seeking to develop the next generation of instrumentation
and data assimilation tools necessary to provide
the nowcast and forecast products required by
the coastal ocean resource management community.
South Florida Ecosystem Restoration science
activities at AOML include a number of interdisciplinary
projects. Specific subject areas were determined
and priorities assigned based in conjunction
with NOAA's federal, state, and regional partners
cooperating in the multi-agency SFER effort.
Projects include: delineating and monitoring
the circulation and exchange between Florida
Bay and adjacent waters (Figure
18), the physical component supports the
Bay Circulation Model and the biological and
chemical monitoring component supports the Quality
and Ecological Models; paleoecological studies
of the history of the Bay ecosystem (Figure
19) that have been instrumental in setting
restoration objectives by elucidating the salinity
history of Florida Bay prior to extensive water
management; kinetic and field studies quantifying
the critical relationship between dissolved
phosphorous and calcium carbonate chemistry
which determines the availability of this essential
nutrient to phytoplankton and seagrass primary
producers; measuring for the first time within
the Bay the atmospheric deposition of plant
nutrients, the absence of which has been one
of the major uncertainties in Bay nutrient budgets;
development and testing of a new rainfall algorithm
for the Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD), which
is absolutely critical to determining the pattern
and intensity of precipitation over Florida
Bay and the South Florida peninsula given the
highly convective nature of tropical rainfall;
multi-investigator plankton bloom dynamics field
experiments, which have characterized growth
processes, nutrient pathways, and grazing loss
in both the diatom blooms and blue-green algal
blooms (the two dominant modes in Florida Bay);
adaptation and parameterization of the Advance
Regional Prediction Simulation (ARPS) model
to the South Florida Peninsula to improve prediction
of the rainfall, wind, and evaporation fields
under various restoration scenarios and initial
conditions(Figure
20 and Figure
21); and, most recently, an exploratory
investigation of the distribution and degradation
rate of an important class of anthropogenic
pollutants (polycyclic aromatics - PAH) in South
Florida.