Oceanographic Weather Maps: Using Oceanographic Models to Improve Seabed Mapping Planning and Acquisition

In a world of high precision sensors, one of the few remaining challenges in multibeam echosounding is that of refraction based uncertainty. A poor understanding of oceanographic variability can lead to inadequate sampling of the water mass and the uncertainties that result from this can dominate the uncertainty budget of even state-of-the-art echosounding systems. Though dramatic improvements have been made in sensor accuracies over the past few decades, survey accuracy and efficiency is still potentially limited by a poor understanding of the “underwater weather”. Advances in the sophistication of numerical oceanographic forecast modeling, combined with ever increasing computing power, allow for the timely operation and dissemination of oceanographic nowcast and forecast model systems on regional and global scales. These sources of information, when examined using sound speed uncertainty analysis techniques, have the potential to change the way hydrographers work by increasing our understanding of what to expect from the ocean and when to expect it. Sound speed analyses derived from ocean modeling system’s three-dimensional predictions could provide guidance for hydrographers during survey planning, acquisition and post-processing of hydrographic data. In this work, we examine techniques for processing and visualizing of predictions from global and regional operational oceanographic forecast models and climatological analyses from an ocean atlas to better understand how these data could best be put to use to in the field of hydrograph

Coastal Situational Awareness via nowCOAST’s Web Mapping Services and Map Viewer

NowCOAST is a GIS-based Web mapping portal developed by the National Ocean Service’s (NOS) Coast Survey Development Laboratory that provides users with situational awareness of current and future environmental conditions for U.S. coastal areas. nowCOAST accomplishes this by integrating selected near-real-time data, satellite imagery, warnings, and forecasts of meteorological, oceanographic, and river conditions from NOAA’s Weather, Ocean, and Satellite Services, NOAA’s Research, other federal agencies, and regional ocean observing systems. nowCOAST makes the observations, imagery, warnings, and forecasts available to users via on-map display and geo-referenced hyperlinks. Coastal users can display nowCOAST products via its Web map viewer (http://nowcoast.noaa.gov) or by connecting to nowCOAST’s map service. Users can access nowCOAST’s map service directly from desktop GIS applications (e.g., ArcMAP and ArcGIS Explorer) and from ArcGIS Server-based or ArcIMS-based web mapping sites and overlay nowCOAST map layers with their own data layers. Recently, a nowCOAST Open Geospatial Consortium-compliant Web Map Service has been implemented to allow nonArc-based desktop GIS applications and web mapping software (e.g., MapServer) to access nowCOAST products. nowCOAST will be enhanced to support several collaborative projects including the Coastal and Inland Flood Observation and Warning project, the Environmental Response Management Application web mapping portal project, and the Southern California Weather and Hazards Viewer. nowCOAST uses Arc Internet Map Server, Arc Spatial Data Engine, ArcGIS Engine and an Oracle database. NowCOAST will be migrated to the ArcGIS Server platform during the coming year

Supporting Advocacy, Deliberation, and Civic Learning in the Classroom

We live, teach and learn in complicated times. As faculty in higher education, we have the opportunity to help uphold the civic purpose of higher education. We are accustomed to helping students navigate academic information, and to equipping them for more standard academic tasks. Through thoughtful course design, we can also help our students become better consumers and evaluators of less traditionally academic information: from critically interpreting what they read and see in the news media, to engaging the arguments of their friends, peers and family members. Further, we can challenge our students to use these evaluative skills to engage in debate and advocacy activities around critical issues of the day

The CI-FLOW Project: A System for Total Water Level Prediction from the Summit to the Sea

Kildow et al. (2009) reported that coastal states support 81% of the U.S. population and generate 83 percent [$11.4 trillion (U.S. dollars) in 2007] of U.S. gross domestic product. Population trends show that a majority of coastal communities have transitioned from a seasonal, predominantly weekend, tourist-based economy to a year-round, permanently based, business economy where industry expands along shorelines and the workforce commutes from inland locations. As a result of this transition, costs associated with damage to the civil infrastructure and disruptions to local and regional economies due to coastal flooding events are escalating, pushing requirements for a new generation of flood prediction technologies and hydrologic decision support tools

Dermal melanoma in a transplant patient

Case study: A 37-year-old white woman on over 10 years of immunosuppressive therapy for two successive renal transplants was seen in our dermatology clinic for a tender lesion on her left eyebrow which had grown rapidly over the previous few months