The New England Coastal Basins Observatory: Documentation of Hydrologic Transport Processes

The New England Coastal Basins Observatory is a proposed response to the NSF Environmental Observatories Initiative. The Observatory functions now as $7 million of field research in the Blackstone River and Plymouth-Carver Aquifer by the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department of UMass Amherst. Observatory assets also include Long Term Ecological Research sites at Hubbard Brook, NH and Plum Island, MA and the Microwave Remote Sensing Laboratory of UMass Amherst. This core will expand to a consortium of universities, government agencies, and private organizations across New England. The Observatory will study transport processes across hydrologic boundaries at field research sites in New England Coastal Basins over a cascade of length and time scales. Ongoing, proposed, and future research illustrate the Observatory approach, which will include conventional investigations of water distribution through watersheds, rivers, and reservoirs. The Observatory will extend the Initiative however by measuring the transport of contaminants, momentum, and sediment across interfaces between the surface water, groundwater, atmosphere, and nearshore environments in the Basins. Deicing agent ions and isotopes will serve as hydrologic tracers to document the age and trajectory of the flow field. Metal fate and transport, shear stress, storm surge, and coastal erosion will emerge as field documented, hydrologic phenomena at hourly, diurnal, seasonal, and annual scales. The cascade of scales and constituent data will support independent calibrations of common transport coefficients.