An Environmental Information System for Hypoxia in Corpus Christi Bay: A WATERS Network Testbed

This project is creating and demonstrating a prototype Environmental Information System (EIS) that couples sensor measurements with end-to-end cyberinfrastructure to improve understanding of hypoxia in Corpus Christi Bay (CC Bay), Texas. Hypoxia is a common estuarine phenomenon that occurs when dissolved oxygen concentrations fall below 2 mg/L, and has resulted in about a ten-fold reduction in benthic standing stock and diversity in CC Bay. The hypoxia in CC Bay is correlated with salinity-induced stratification of the bay, but the stratification forcing and the spatial and temporal patterns of the hypoxia remain uncertain. In this project, an interdisciplinary team of hydrologists, environmental engineers, biologists, and computer scientists are collaborating to improve understanding of hypoxia by: (1) creating an Environmental Data Access System for CC Bay data archives, leveraging CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) Web service developments to create data services that automatically ingest observed data in both national and local remote data archives; (2) developing an Environmental Modeling System for CC Bay hypoxia, leveraging NCSA Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstrator (ECID) CyberIntegrator technology to combine numerical hydrodynamic, dissolved oxygen, and oxygen demand models with data mining using hierarchical machine learning algorithms; and (3) demonstrating the effectiveness of the EIS for supporting adaptive hypoxia sampling and collaborative research using ECID's CyberCollaboratory. This paper will give initial results and future plans for the project.