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ICON/CREWS The ICON/CREWS program, as a part of NOAA's Coral Health And Monitoring Programs (CHAMP), is designed to collect real time environmental data from prime coral reef sites throughout the world, analyze patterns and trends via expert systems (an artificial intelligence technology) and predict the effects of environmental events on coral reefs such as bleaching, fish and invertebrate spawning and migration. CIMAS researchers working in association with the ICON project at the Atlantic Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) provide expertise to the ICON/CREWS knowledge engineer in the configuring of expert systems which have been designed to analyze the influence of tens of thousands of permutations of meteorological and oceanographic parameters on the reef environments. The data are collected at remote stations located in coral reef areas such as St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands and Lee Stocking Island, Bahamas. These on-site stations record environmental data encompassing but not limited to atmospheric and sea temperatures, wind speeds and direction, ultraviolet radiation at the surface and 1 meter depth, tides, salinity, and barometric pressure. These data are relayed in near real-time hourly intervals via a GOES satellite transmission and received in encoded format by NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS). NESDIS makes the recent data available through the Internet. An automated range checking at AOML validates the received data and formats it for insertion into the long-term database. The ICON Integrated Monitoring Network Application (IMN) provides the architecture to receive data from multiple sources concurrently, at the same time servicing query requests from Internet users and automated computer programs that use the data to produce information synthesis products (“alerts”) based on the knowledge gleaned from domain experts. The end users (e.g., researchers, marine sanctuary managers, and the public) receive high quality, reliable data on demand, advancing the understanding of coral reefs and their environments.
Prepared by
Louis Florit
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