Coastal
and Regional 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.