But what pollution, how much and where is it coming from? Those are murky questions that may soon be cleared up with the help of a super high-tech computer modeling system run by
The modeling technology, which can generate simulations in just a few minutes as opposed to days, promises to help scientists and government agencies understand how pollutants like phosphorus and nitrogen are transported through canals into the bay, and the harmful effects they create.
Knowing how water and pollution circulates is crucial to any project to improve water quality in
"What we need is a way to assess the conditions in the bay with a model that is dynamic and with enough density to help us understand what is going on," Briceno said last week.
A fish kill in August was yet another warning sign of how the bay's health is suffering from rising pollution levels and warmer water temperatures, a result of climate change. The decline is not sudden. For decades, the bay has suffered from regulatory neglect, with unfinished projects and poorly executed management plans.
killed thousands of fish
Water quality models use data and mathematical simulations to help policy makers manage pollution and other issues. Modeling the physical and chemical processes that occur in the bay under different circumstances — how the water flows, based on forces that create circulation like tides, wind, rainfall, and inflows from canals, and how pollutants behave — can help agencies stay ahead of pollution events, he said.
FIU's Biscayne Bay Operational Hydrodynamic,
The idea is to use hypothetical data to simulate scenarios, or to use real data to reproduce an event like the fish kill or coral bleaching, to find out what caused it. It could be also used to estimate the effects of pollution on mangroves, or to recreate the hydrological and water quality conditions just before the seagrass in the northern part of
"The main purpose of this model is to analyze scenarios. For instance, what would happen if we saw some nutrient load coming from canals, or if we had a spill somewhere in the bay? How would these inputs affect the bay?" Garcia said.
This type of computer modeling to manage water quality issues isn't new. Others have been used in
Garcia said this model is easy to use, and will be accessible to be used as a management plan by multiple agencies. The high-performance computing power will allow the FIU team to run simulations in just 20 minutes, compared with nine days if they were using conventional modeling set-ups, Garcia said.
As part of the project,
The model may also help scientists answer a big-picture question: is
The bay's steady decline over the decades led to an alarming conclusion last year: the bay was in danger of a regime shift, as its life-giving seagrass beds are gradually being smothered by thick algae that are being fed by rising nutrient levels in the water.
The study by the
That's making the bay less resilient. It just can't bounce back from big pollution events as well as it did before, Briceno said.
"After the bay goes over that tipping point, the ecosystem goes into a different state, which is very difficult to recover from," he said. "But we cannot explain exactly what's going on because we don't have the data."
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