Application of COASTMAP as an Initial Demonstration of the National Backbone of the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS)

COASTMAP, a globally re-locatable marine environmental modeling and monitoring system, has been extensively upgraded, extended, and applied as an initial demonstration of the national backbone of the integrated ocean observing system (IOOS). Following the guidelines from the IOOS Data Management and Communications (DMAC) plan, the system provides end-to-end implementation, from data supplier to user, and includes data discovery; data and archive access; data fusion; and product generation, assessment, and product dissemination. The geographic information based system has two primary users; a professional. Windows ArcGIS- based (thick) client and a web browser-based (thin) client. The implementation features a web services approach to obtaining data from OPeNDAP and COASTMAP servers and supports a wide variety of data protocols and types. To illustrate the system's capabilities, it has been applied to demonstrate the use of disparate data sources (observations and model predictions) from a wide variety of providers to predict when and where ship traffic should be re-routed to avoid potential interactions with protected marine resources (marine mammal-marine transportation interaction) and to predict the oceanographic and climatic conditions that indicate a hindrance to naval sea basing. For the marine mammal ship interaction application the system has been applied to assess the impact of ship traffic on North Atlantic right whales in Cape Cod Bay. Biweekly data on right whale distributions are based on aerial surveys. US Coast Guard Automated Identification System (AIS) provides historical and real time information on the location of all vessels transiting the area. An embedded ship routing model provides the ability to forecast vessel paths. Supporting environmental data includes real time and historical water level and wind data from monitoring stations, nowcasts and forecasts of currents, salinity, temperature, and meteorological variables from regional and national scale models, and a whale-sighting database. The system allows the user to animate any of the environmental variables for selected areas (windows) and times. It also includes an embedded model to predict the probability that a ship transiting the area will or has struck a whale. For the sea basing application, the demonstration focused on the use of the system to assist in the pre-positioning and continued environmental assessment of the deployment of a maritime force platform in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. The system provides real time access to model predicted sea surface currents, winds, and significant wave forecasts from Navy models of the Gulf of Mexico, to climatological data bases for the same variables, and to observations from NOAA buoy observations.