Coastal Virginians will soon have at their disposal, a new resource to better track everything from the ebb and flow of the tides, to harmful algal blooms to bay temperatures. The Center of Excellence in Environmental Forecasting, recently established by William & Mary’s Batten School of Coastal and Marine Sciences and the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS), is working to combine the environmental work from faculty members over the past 10 years to enhance their public data products.
“Because a lot of the modeling can work together in synergistic ways, the initial stages that we’re in right now involve taking the tools that we’ve already built and making them more user friendly and more accessible to the public,” said Derek Aday, dean and director of William & Mary’s Batten School and VIMS.
The new center has been in discussion for years. Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman presented Aday with a $1.6 million check in federal funds. That’s on top of almost $800,000 the center received from the state, individual funding to the center’s faculty and other external donations. The funding boost means VIMS is now in a position to launch the center.
The funding will largely support more advanced computers for the forecast systems to run more reliably, as well as mobile accessibility and potentially an exclusive mobile application.
The forecast system is used by recreational fishermen and charter captains to find the most active fish zones, hatcheries and shellfish growers looking for the pH and salinity of the water, or scientists engaged in studies. But a coastal resident going out for a run, a swim at the beach, or a fishing trip, might also want to know conditions on the bay.
“When we started off doing this, we mostly thought that only locality planners and managers would be using this information,” said Molly Mitchell, a Batten School and VIMS professor. “But we actually have a lot of people in the public who use this information, and that information is maybe not conveyed in the way that’s most useful to them. So this allows us to create products that reach different user groups.”
Marjy Friedrichs, a professor at William & Mary’s Batten School and VIMS, works with the 11 data sets that are part of the center’s Chesapeake Bay Environmental Forecast System. The products display conditions expected for the next five days such as salinity, or levels of salt in the water, acidification, oxygen levels, temperatures and chances of coming across stinging jellyfish.
“One of our things that actually gets clicked on the most is our sea nettle forecast,” Friedrichs said. “We’re not predicting exactly where the jellyfish will be, we’re predicting percent likelihood they’ll be there. So kind of like rain forecasts — if the conditions are ripe for sea nettles.”
Although the data sets are already available on mobile devices online, the products were originally developed to be viewed on computers, making it more difficult to interact with the graphs on a phone.
Mitchell produces the annual Sea Level Rise Report Card, which follows sea level rise at 36 cities in the United States, and works with the center’s TideWatch tools, both of which have been up and running for about six years now.
“The TideWatch map is projecting expected flooding in the next 36 hours, and it steps through hour by hour,” Mitchell said. “But people also use it a lot with high tides. Sometimes those high tides cover road surfaces that make it harder for people to get in and out of their neighborhood.”
Throughout their years of research, Friedrichs and Mitchell have both seen environmental changes impact the data.
“We’ve really been focusing on trying to see these long-term trends, and it’s not really crystal clear, but if you analyze the data, you can see just how much the bay is warming,” Friedrichs said.
Virginia waters are warming much more than Maryland waters, she said, and much of this is because of the warmer ocean water being pushed into the bay.
With sea level, Mitchell said that not much has changed in the data, which means their understanding of water levels over the next five years is matching what’s happening at their tide gauges. However, Virginia still has the highest rate of sea level rise.
“There’s a geological process called glacial isostatic rebound, which is causing the land in Virginia to sink slightly every year,” Mitchell said. “There’s also areas where we’re withdrawing large amounts of water, and that can cause localized areas of sinking.”
With these natural conditions, Virginia and its coastal zones are key locations in tracking and understanding environmental changes.
“We’ve used this tagline for a long time — science for solutions,” Aday said. “Impact and application are two things that are North Stars for us, and what I expect to happen is that we continue to have more and more impact with this work.”
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