Tag Archives: WHOI

UMassD Scientists Join US-India Collaboration

wp_ASIRI_croppedUMass Dartmouth Prof. Amit Tandon (College of Engineering/SMAST) is leading a first-of-its-kind collaboration between the United States and India to support large-scale research on monsoon prediction.

Researchers from the two countries are working together to understand ocean processes in the international waters of the Bay of Bengal and their relation to the annual monsoon, which is a dominant factor in the lives of the population of the Indian subcontinent.

The Office of Naval Research is funding the participating U.S. scientists and contributing the resources of the R/V Roger Revelle. The ship made a call in the port of Chennai in mid-June, the first U.S. research vessel to call at an Indian port since the 1980s, and has since completed its first successful data-gathering cruise in the Bay of Bengal.

The bilateral team also includes Dr. Amala Mahadevan, WHOI senior scientist and SMAST adjunct faculty, Dr. Sanjiv Ramachandran, research associate in Tandon’s Upper Ocean Dynamics Lab, and scientists from 17 other U.S. and Indian institutions.

As part of the collaboration, Dr. Tandon and several U.S. colleagues have returned to India to conduct a two-week training workshop at the Indian Institute of Science Bangalore on upper-ocean dynamics in the Bay of Bengal. Read full press release.

Photo: Amit Tandon welcomes scientists aboard the R/V Roger Revelle in Chennai, India, as co-chief scientist Dr. Emily Shroyer from Oregon State University looks on.

SMAST Bolsters Fisheries Expertise

wp_fay_et_alThe School for Marine Science and Technology has announced the appointment of Dr. Gavin Fay as Assistant Professor in the Department of Fisheries Oceanography.

A fisheries modeler, Dr. Fay received his BSc in Marine Biology from the University of Stirling, Scotland, and his MS and PhD from the University of Washington. He is currently employed as a Postdoctoral Research Associate with the Ecosystem Assessment Program of the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) in Woods Hole.

Fay’s expertise is in quantitative fisheries science and ecosystem modeling, with a research focus on spatial modeling and statistical analyses of marine fisheries populations. He has published in the area of population assessment for both fisheries and marine mammals.

The faculty position was created under a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program called Quantitative Ecology and Socioeconomics Training (QUEST), which also created three new fellowships for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientists with NMFS funding.

Dr. Fay (left in photo with WHOI QUEST fellows) will officially join the faculty for the fall 2014 semester.

Chen Receives NERACOOS Award

wp_chen_neracoosSMAST Prof. Changsheng Chen and WHOI Scientist Emeritus Robert Beardsley were presented with the annual meeting award last week by NERACOOS, the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal and Ocean Observing Systems.

“From the founding of NERACOOS, Changsheng Chen and Robert Beardsley have led the development and evaluation of numerical models of water properties, currents and waves in the northwest Atlantic,” the award text reads. “These models add value to the NERACOOS data products, and extend the reach of the observing system to a wider spectrum of users by providing real time forecasts.”

The cited models are based on the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model originated by Chen, and developed and refined in collaboration with Beardsley for over a decade. The Marine Ecosystem Dynamics Modeling Group at SMAST, led by Chen, is involved in applying the FVCOM model to aquatic systems the world over.

NERACOOS was incorporated in November 2008 to “lead the development, implementation, operation, and evaluation of a sustained, regional coastal ocean observing system for the northeast United States and Canadian Maritime provinces… .” NERACOOS is one of eleven regional associations that constitute the United States Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS®).

Photo, l to r: Changsheng Chen, Zdenka Willis (Director U.S. IOOS Program Office), Robert Beardsley.

NSF Awards Support WHOI/SMAST Collaborations

wp_cold_poolThe National Science Foundation has funded a pair of studies of the coastal ocean to be conducted jointly by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and SMAST.

A $1.5 million award to a team led by PI Anthony Kirincich (WHOI) will support the first comprehensive study of current variability in the coastal ocean at scales from hundreds of meters to tens of kilometers. This unprecedented level of detail will be made possible by a combination of dense observations made by WHOI and a computer model, developed by SMAST Prof. Changsheng Chen and collaborators, which is capable of resolving very intricate oceanic and coastal features.

The model, called the Finite Volume Community Ocean Model, will also be employed in a $600 thousand study led by WHOI PI Steve Lentz analyzing the so-called “Cold Pool,” a band of cold, nutrient-rich bottom water that extends the length of the Middle Atlantic Bight (from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras) throughout the spring and summer. Many of the migratory fish species of the region have evolved to either seek out or avoid the cold waters of this bottom feature, and growing concerns about the impact of global climate change on the ecosystem, especially fisheries, adds urgency to the investigation.

Red Tide Populations Parsed

wp_jeff_and_chrissyNOAA-funded research demonstrating a disconnect between Georges Bank “red tides” and those in Gulf of Maine coastal waters has helped open a shellfish fishery valued at $10-15 million annually. The Gulf of Maine Toxicity (GOMTOX) team—including scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, SMAST, and other universities and federal agencies—has shown that Georges Bank populations of toxic algae are distinct from inshore populations. These research results, along with a new testing protocol instituted in partnership with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have led to the opening of long-closed ocean quahog and surf clam resources on Georges Bank to commercial harvest.

Ph.D. student Chrissy Petitpas, working in Prof. Jeff Turner’s Biological Oceanography-Plankton Ecology laboratory at SMAST, discovered that toxic algae populations on Georges Bank have different toxin compositions and levels than coastal Gulf of Maine populations, levels 2-3 times lower than their nearshore counterparts. Along with Turner, SMAST Prof. Cindy Pilskaln’s laboratory is part of the GOMTOX team, contributing vertical flux measurements of algal cells, cysts, and other materials from sediment trap deployments. Read WHOI news release.

UMassD to Share in $2M Ocean Observing Grant

wp_scituate1_croppedThe University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and six partner institutions will share $2 million in the next fiscal year awarded by NERACOOS, the Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems. The UMassD funding will support continued development of models to predict the impact of storm inundation on New England coastal municipalities. Led by Dr. Changsheng Chen of SMAST and long-time collaborator Dr. Robert Beardsley of WHOI, a research team has validated these models in Scituate, Massachusetts, and Saco, Maine, for selected extratropical storms (nor’easters) of 2005, 2007 and 2010. Work is now underway to extend the model domain to cover the entire Massachusetts coast and establish an inundation forecast model system for the state. Read full UMassD release.

Scientists Huddle on High-Performance Computing Applications

wp_MGHPCCTeams of marine scientists led by MIT, UMass Dartmouth, and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution gathered at SMAST last week to match new computing resources with questions related to the oceanography of the continental shelf and slope. The two-day workshop was made possible by a seed grant from the new Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center in Holyoke. The MGHPCC is the first facility of its kind in the nation: a collaboration of state government, private industry, and five of the state’s most research-intensive universities. The workshop was motivated by the advent of the Pioneer Array ocean observatory, which will be generating ocean data of unprecedented density just off our shores. “We are planning how best to take advantage of the simultaneous arrival of a significant new data stream and the computing power to understand and interpret that data,” said UMassD workshop organizer Prof. Amit Tandon (Physics/SMAST). (See workshop program and related presentations here.)

One Year On, Lessons from Japan Quake

wp_Fukushima_fig_no_meshIn the months that followed the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, a legion of scientists undertook to investigate the phenomenon and to project its effects into the future. Highlights of that research are now available on line in the article “Lessons from the 2011 Japan Quake,” at the online version of Oceanus, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s popular science magazine. Among the featured scientists is SMAST Professor Changsheng Chen, who, along with longtime collaborator Dr. Robert Beardsley of WHOI, uses the computer model FVCOM to simulate the tsunami itself and then to predict the dispersion in the ocean of radioactive products from the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant.

NOAA Provides New Funding for GOM Research

wp_cindy_trap_dec09SMAST oceanographer and Professor Cindy Pilskaln is one of a team of Massachusetts scientists recently funded to begin a new modeling phase of their study of the harmful algal blooms which have plagued the Gulf of Maine for several decades. The team, which includes Woods Hole Oceanographic and U.S. Geological Survey investigators, will use the data they have collected over the past six years, along with new lab experiments and sediment maps, to improve operational forecasting capability for such blooms. The project is supported by NOAA’s ECOHAB (Ecology of Harmful Algal Blooms) program.