


Unveiling of the First Long-Term, Real-Time Water Quality/Meteorological Network in Mobile Bay www.mymobilebay.com July 11, 2005
Media Contact: Lisa Young 251/861-7509 For Immediate Release: July 11, 2005 Dauphin Island, Alabama What: Unveiling of the First Long-Term, Real-Time Water Quality/Meteorological Network in Mobile Bay www.mymobilebay.com When: Wednesday, July 13, 2005 ? 2:30pm Where: Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce, McGowin Room Panelists: Commissioner Barnett Lawley, Alabama Department of Conservation and National Resources; David Yeager, Mobile Bay National Estuary Program; George Crozier, Dauphin Island Sea Lab; Systke Kimball, Meteorology Department, University of South Alabama; Bob Shipp, Marine Sciences Department, University of South Alabama; Hal Pierce, Alabama Lighthouse Association Invited: Members of the media; weather reporters, sports reporters, public users (those with fishing interests, boaters, swimmers, educators, weather junkies, etc.) The first long-term water quality/meteorological network has been established in Mobile Bay. In a nearly unprecedented collaboration of effort, a variety of agencies have pooled their resources to establish this long-needed continuous (24/7) monitoring capability. Numerous "snapshots" of Bay conditions have been obtained through past studies, but long-term characterizations are not available. The strong linkage between the hydrography and meteorology has long been recognized but seldom given quantitative scrutiny by the research or management agencies around the Bay. For many years, the Dauphin Island Sea Lab (DISL) maintained a meteorological station on the east end of the island, but hydrographic data has only been available for the past few years at the Estuarium. This surface station on the north side of the island was not considered representative of Mobile Bay, but did allow an examination of the interaction of the bay with the Gulf of Mexico. Over the past three years, the DISL and the Mobile Bay National Estuary program (MBNEP) refurbished and added instrumentation to the Dauphin Island site; increased the capability of the site at the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve; and just last year, established a station at the north end of the Bay at Meaher Park. These actions were accomplished using funds from the Coastal Impact Assistance program and the MBNEP. Alone, these three sites provide a north-south examination of Bay hydrography. But it is with the addition of the 3-dimensional station at Middle Bay Light that the system has become truly valuable to both the technical community and the general public! The Lighthouse Association has provided -more- access to the facility, while the Oyster Program at the University of South Alabama purchased the instrumentation necessary to provide a vertical assessment of the water column near the center of the Bay. The salinity distribution throughout the Bay is a key factor in the success of the oyster population. The Coastal Program of the Lands Division of ADCNR provided funding to the Sea Lab for initial construction and maintenance of the site for the first year. The Coastal Program is committed to assisting the State in meeting its obligations under the coastal non-point source pollution program and impacts within the Bay are major management concerns. This aquatic network is complemented by researchers at the Coastal Weather Research Center at the University of South Alabama (USA) who have received grants from National Science Foundation (NSF) and Senator Richard Shelby to install meteorological observation sites in the Mobile Bay area. The meteorological instruments on the Middle Bay Light site were funded through the NSF grant. The USA project forms part of a larger scale nation-wide effort to increase weather data availability for forecasting, research, and education. The National Weather Service (NWS) is updating their network of volunteer weather observers (known as cooperative observers) by means of their Coop Modernization Program. In order to gain maximum benefit from these efforts, the data need to be shared and accessible to all interested parties. To achieve this goal, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) have put together the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System, or MADIS. This central database collects data from a wide variety of sources and automatically streams data to NWS forecast offices to be included in real-time weather prediction. In addition, data are archived and accessible in a uniform format to researchers and educators from various disciplines and backgrounds. Meteorological and aquatic data can also be made available to the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) for assimilation into real-time weather forecast models. Hurricanes form an important application that has attracted a lot of attention in recent months. The NEP monitoring sites include meteorological as well as marine components. This makes these sites ideally suited for hurricane forecasting and research. Knowing the temperature of a body of water that a hurricane is approaching will improve forecasts of the intensity of a hurricane at landfall. A dense network of observation sites in hurricane-prone regions will allow researchers to investigate the processes that are important during hurricane landfall and how to predict where the maximum winds and rainfall rates are going to be. Furthermore, such a network will allow numerical weather models -that predict hurricane tracks and intensity - to be verified and fine tuned. The system will soon incorporate data from both the National Estuarine Research reserves at Weeks Bay and Grand Bay, thus providing an east-west line for the technical community. Efforts are being made to have the Alabama effort be part of the Gulf Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS). Planning already incorporates agencies and marine laboratories in Mississippi and Louisiana. Much of the existing format has been drawn from the programs in place at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium (LUMCON). Data management for the Mobile Bay project will be handled by the Data Information Management System of the MBNEP. While the physical maintenance of the system will be the responsibility of the Technical Support Group at DISL, the MBNEP will provide a portion of the annual maintenance funding to ensure this first attempt at a long-term series of hydrographic observations in Mobile Bay remains viable.