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Skidaway Institute expanding coastal radar system |
The Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) has awarded Skidaway Institute of Oceanography a grant of $180,000 to enhance and expand Skidaway Institute’s coastal radar system that is used to study surface ocean waves and currents on Georgia’s continental shelf.
The system is built currently around two radar stations, one in South Carolina and the other on a barrier island south of Savannah. The two systems work together to create a detailed map of surface ocean currents across an area stretching more than 125 miles offshore and 135 miles north to south. The map shows the speed and direction of the current at each of those points on the ocean’s surface.
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The grant money will be used to improve the system’s ability to monitor different size waves and to install a third radar station on the Georgia coast which will greatly improve the coverage area.
“This kind of data is extremely valuable for search and rescue operations or for tracking oil spills,” said Dana Savidge, the Skidaway Institute researcher in charge of the project.
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Aside from the practical applications, Savidge says the primary purpose of the system is to improve researchers’ understanding of what is happening on Georgia’s continental shelf.
The special high frequency radar, known as WERA, bounces radio signals off the ocean waves. One particular size wave results in a strong reflection, depending on the frequency of the radar signal. The waves travel on the water, and the water itself also moves due to winds and tides. Because the speed of a wave is determined by its size, the system can factor out the wave velocity and measure the speed and direction of the water itself.
Savidge’s research interests include studying Gulf Stream effects on continental shelf circulation. The coverage area of the current radar allows it to monitor current patterns into the Gulf Stream as it flows northward on an undulating course at the edge of the shelf. The expansion will significantly increase that area to the south.
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“The next radar installation on the Georgia coast will pave the way for collaborative work across our southern border into Florida,” said Savidge. “Our coverage will extend southward into the North Florida shelf where a group of Florida scientists are planning two new WERA sites.”
According to Savidge, these efforts, like Skidaway Institute’s, are part of the nation’s Ocean Research Priorities Plan, which calls for a nationwide coastal observatory system, to serve both societal and research needs regionally and nationally.
The GRA funding will also be used to acquire additional hardware and software to improve and enhance wave height estimates across the inner and middle shelf.
“This kind of information is in high demand from ocean and atmospheric modelers and is of interest to the National Weather Service for their wave forecasts and rip-tide warnings,” Savidge said. “The system’s third radar installation will significantly increase the capability of estimating currents on the shelf and along the shelf edge, and will approximately double the area over which wave estimates can be made.”
Skidaway scientists want to make the information they gather easily accessible to anyone who needs it. In addition to posting the data on the Internet, they plan to create displays at the University of Georgia Aquarium on Skidaway Island and other locations around the area.
“With the planned improvements, we expect to provide reliable measurements of wave heights, along with current speeds and directions across a substantial portion of the continental shelf in near real-time,” Savidge said.
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-Posted 5/9/2008 |
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Learn more about our marine science research projects near and far |
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Skidaway Marine Science Day set for Saturday, October 11
An afternoon of marine science program, displays, tours and activities -- Skidaway Marine Science Day 2008 -- will be held on Saturday, October 11, from noon to 5 p.m. on the campus of the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography at the north end of Skidaway Island. This campus-wide open house will be presented by the campus's marine research and education organizations, including the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography, the University of Georgia Marine Education Center and Aquarium, the UGA Shellfish Research Laboratory, Gray's Reef National Marine Sanctuary and WSVH Georgia Public Radio.
Skidaway Marine Science Day activities will be designed to interest both adults and children. All activities at Skidaway Marine Science Day will be free.
For additional information, call (912) 598-2325, or visit www.skio.usg.edu. |
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SkIO expanding its research fleet |
Scientists from Skidaway Institute soon will be able to better research the sh  allowest of tidal creeks thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation. An NSF grant awarded to SkIO will fund the purchase of a 28-ft fiberglass vessel especially designed for rapid surveys of shallow water environments. The vessel replaces an aging 25-ft estuarine and coastal survey boat purchased more than 12 years ago. The vessel will be part of a robust scientific research system that will include sensors for navigation, ocean currents, dissolved chemical species and bottom characterization, as well as a data acquisition system. The vessel will be powered by twin outboard engines and can be transported easily over land with a trailer.
The data collection system configured on the new vessel will make data generally available to all interested scientists. The data collection package will be portable also, so that it can be moved to alternate vessels, thus ensuring its availability to many different user groups. All instrumentation will operate simultaneously with the navigation system to give complete physical/geophysical data suites within coastal and intracoastal waters. In essence, it will be like taking a larger, well-equipped research vessel, usually involved with research in larger bodies of water, into the shallowest of tidal creeks.
Principal investigators who initiated funding for this project are Jack Blanton and Jim Sanders.
Posted: 2007/11/27 08:32:34
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SkIO Science Highlight
Measuring marsh elevations from aircraft |
Coastal Georgia has numerous estuaries and tidal creeks surrounded by some of the largest intertidal (marsh) areas in the United States. These salt marshes are picturesque features of the coastal zone. They are also spawning and nursery habitats for a number of marine animals, providing nutrients for their use through twice-daily inundation by the tide. The efficiency that enables tides to furnish nutrients and remove wastes from a marsh is controlled, to a large extent, by marsh morphology, i.e., the distribution of high and low elevations. Defining the topography of a tidal channel and its estuaries, however, can be complicated. Over the past decade, two researchers at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO) in collaboration with an international group of scientists have focused their attention on tidal circulation in the channels surrounding salt marshes.
In 1999, Dr. Jack Blanton and research coordinator, Julie Amft, began collaborating with fellow scientists in South Carolina, Massachusetts, Portugal and Brazil to measure the elevations of the intertidal areas typical of salt marshes. These high-resolution data sets are known as digital elevation models (DEMs). Such data are becoming increasingly important elements of numerical models designed to simulate flow in tidal channels. Examples of important information that can be derived from an area's DEM include its morphology, the tidal prism (related to the flushing of a tidal channel), and the hypsometric curve (the distribution of surface area to water depth).
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Existing data for the intertidal areas of marshes are usually limited since accessibility to them is generally restricted and difficult. The use of remote sensing from aircraft mitigates this difficulty. From a series of aerial images during a rising tide, measurements of the areal distribution were then converted to a grid of marsh elevations at resolutions as high as 1 m2. We refer to this technique as DIMITAP (digital measurements of intertidal topography from aerial platforms). The main objective of DIMITAP is to separate water from other reflecting objects in near-infrared images, so that detailed maps of the areal distribution of water, at the time of the image, can be determined. Applying DIMITAP to a series of aerial images obtained during the flood tide phase (elapsed time of 6-7 hours) leads to a high-resolution topographic map of the area (the DEM) (Fig. 1). This MOVIE simulates the increasing water area as it follows the elevation contours during the rising tide. Professor Francisco Andrade and his assistant, Adelaide Ferreira, from the University of Lisbon (Portugal) designed DIMITAP.
The first DEM utilizing DIMITAP was constructed for a study site in South Carolina, on the Okatee River, as part of the Land-Use Ecosystem Research Program (LU-CES)( http://www.lu-ces.org/ ) and sponsored by NOAA's Coastal Ocean Program. The aerial mission was flown by Spectrum North Carolina, Inc. Two LU-CES projects have taken advantage of the Okatee River DEM. The first was a finite-volume circulation model (FVCOM) developed by Dr. Changsheng Chen at the University of Massachusetts. He and Dr. Haosheng Huang have computed detailed tidal currents in the upper reaches of the Okatee as part of the LU-CES project (Huang et al., in press) (Be patient, slow moving link!) ( http://codfish.smast.umassd.edu/research_projects/LUCES/home.html ). The high-resolution DEM of the Okatee is incorporated into the model grid (or mesh) that is the base of FVCOM's application to the Okatee. In a second project, the DIMITAP technique was used to compute flushing times and validate residence time models of the Okatee River (Moore, Blanton and Joye, 2006).
In 2000, tidal marsh areas in Georgia became the focus of the SkIO and Portuguese scientists as part of a larger national program, the Georgia Long-term Ecosystem Research program (G-LTER, http://gce-lter.marsci.uga.edu ), sponsored by the National Science Foundation. The Duplin River (Sapelo Island, GA) was selected as a study site because with twelve main tributary creeks and little upland runoff, the tide is the primary generating force of the creek's circulation. Since only 15% of the high-tide area is covered at low water, the large intertidal expanse greatly affects the tidal circulation in the creek and the resulting fluxes of salt and other material.
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An additional project is underway to take further advantage of the DIMITAP technique. The ALGE model, designed at SRNL, is also being used in Groves Creek, a small tidal creek adjacent to SkIO. Plans are underway to acquire the necessary flood-tide sequence of aerial infrared images and then to use the DIMITAP technique to provide high-resolution elevations of the intertidal area in Groves Creek. The Groves Creek marsh presents new challenges because the drainage patterns in the center of the marsh are unusually complex. However, there are new opportunities because the marsh is small enough to cover the entire domain from a helicopter. Moreover, being in SkIO's own backyard decreases the magnitude of the logistical problems associated with providing facilities for an airplane.
The use of remote sensing from aircraft, as described here, is being motivated by attempts to understand how transport processes in complex intertidal areas can be linked to marsh biogeochemistry, organic matter fluxes, and plant distributions. The tidal channels and marshes here in the southeastern US are prototypes of similar areas found throughout the planet. The attempt centered here at SkIO is attracting oceanographers from regions encompassing the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and Europe.
Acknowledgments : Several agencies have supported these efforts over the past 10 years. We thank the following:
Georgia Coastal Zone Management Program (Grant No. RR100-279/9262764)
National Science Foundation (LMER Grant No. DEB-9412089, LTER Grant No. OCE-9982133, and SEI+II Grant No. 0429644)
NOAA Coastal Ocean Program (Grant to South Carolina Sea Grant Consortium entitled "Tidal Circulation and Salt Transport in a Tidal Creek-Salt Marsh Complex")
Office of Naval Research (the SEACOOS program, N00014-02-1-0972)
Department of Energy Grant to the Savannah River National Laboratory, SR06-COL073
Luso -- American Foundation
Federal University of Rio Grande, Rio Grande, Brazil
Read more about the GCE-LTER and the Duplin River project:
Exchange Processes between Intertidal Areas and Tidal Creeks: The Duplin River Study by Blanton et al. (http://www.lternet.edu/news/images/spring05/GCE_Duplin_River_Study.pdf)
LTER Network News, Vol 18 (1), Spring . See pages 11 & 12.
Additional reading :
Blanton, J.O., G. Lin and S.A. Elston (2002) Tidal current asymmetry in shallow estuaries and tidal creeks. Continental Shelf Research 22: 1731-1743. pdf
Blanton, J.O., H. Seim, C. Alexander, J. Amft and G. Kineke (2003) Transport of salt and suspended sediments in a curving channel of a coastal plain estuary: Satilla River, GA. Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science., 57:993-1006. pdf
Blanton, J.O., F. Andrade and M. Adelaide Ferreira (2006) The relationship of hydrodynamics and morphology in tidal-creek and salt-marsh systems in South Carolina and Georgia. In: Implications of changing land use patterns to coastal ecosystems. (Eds. Kleppel, G.S., M.R. DeVoe and M.V. Rawson, Jr.) p. 93-107. Springer-Verlag, New York, USA. Abstract
Moore, W. S., J. O. Blanton, and S. B. Joye (2006) Estimates of flushing times, submarine groundwater discharge, and nutrient fluxes to Okatee Estuary, South Carolina, J. Geophys. Res., 111: C09006, doi:10.1029/2005JC003041. pdf
Seim, H.E., J. O. Blanton and S. Elston (2006) Tidal circulation and energy dissipation in a shallow, sinuous estuary, Ocean Dynamics 56 (3-4): 360-375. pdf
Posted: 2007/10/26 10:32:11 |
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Postdoctoral scientist joins SkIO
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 SkIO welcomes Dr. Ai Nihongi as a postdoctoral scientist collaborating with Dr. Gustav Paffenhöfer on studies of the behavior and ecology of marine zooplankton species. Dr. Nihongi received her Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee working with Dr. J. Rudi Strickler, using optical technologies to examine behaviors of freshwater zooplankton. Her dissertation was entitled "Adaptive Behaviors of Crustacean Zooplankton."
Dr. Nihongi is originally from Kanagawa, Japan, and came to the USA in 2000 after receiving her bachelor's degree in Aquatic Biosciences from Tokyo University of Fisheries (now Tokyo University of Marine Sciences and Technology) with Dr. Hidekatsu Yamazaki.
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BOR / USG – transforming lives through education |
 University System Marks 75 Years of "Transforming Lives"
The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia announces its 75th anniversary celebration!
In 1932, twenty-seven separate boards of trustees were consolidated under a single governing Board of Regents.
Read about the birth of the USG, its historical background, and discover how large the University System of Georgia has become over the past 75 years. The list of selected USG Alumni photos may surprise you!
www.usg.edu
USG
75 Years of Transforming Lives
USG Press Release
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography is proud to be a research unit of the University System of Georgia and especially proud to be highlighted in the University System's publication, "The University System of Georgia 75 Years of Transforming Lives."
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| The Roebling House is transformed into a laboratory for the production of ACT's oxygen video by SCAD graduate students Adam Farrell (right: director /cinematographer); Tyler Martinolich (middle: producer/director); and Chris Swaford (left: cinematographer). |
Dr. Jim Nelson and Research Coordinator Charles Robertson are currently engaged in the preparation of the Alliance for Coastal Technology's (ACT) first training video. Three graduate students from the Savannah College of Art and Design have been working closely with the Nelson lab to produce a video for the standardization of Winkler methods to measure oxygen concentrations. The Winkler method dates back to 1888 and is still among the most widely used chemical analyses. This video is intended to provide basic training as a supplement to published protocols. The video in development will provide a model for future ACT training videos. SkIO hosts the Southeastern Center for ACT, a NOAA-supported program whose mandate includes the groundtruthing and inter-laboratory calibration and verification of a diverse suite of physical, chemical and biological sensor technologies. As oceanographic research advances the development of in situ observatories, reliance on robust, accurate sensors will increase dramatically. Even the best sensors require calibration and verification. For example, oxygen sensors must be standardized routinely using verified chemical determinations. A standardized application of sensors and analytical techniques is mandatory for the accurate interpretation of observatory data streams.
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Marine research center a 'go' |
January 17, 2007
Savannah Morning News
Morris News Service
Marine research center a 'go'
Regents give nod to list of bidders, also approve public health doctorate at Georgia Southern
ATLANTA -- The State Board of Regents on Tuesday approved a list of construction companies for the university system to enter into negotiations to construct the $5 million Marine and Coastal Science Research Center at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography in Savannah.
About $3.7 million is set aside for the actual construction of the center, which is designed to have 12,000 to 16,000 square feet of floor space when finished.
Choate Construction of Pooler won the rights to negotiate first with the system, followed by R.W. Allen and Associates of Augusta and Dabbs-Williams General Contractors LLC of Statesboro.
The Skidaway Institute is an autonomous research unit of the University System of Georgia. Its stated mission is to provide Georgia with a nationally and internationally recognized center for marine science.
Also on Tuesday, with the state facing a crunch in public health workers, the Regents approved a doctorate degree in public health at Georgia Southern University.
According to board documents, Georgia lags far behind the national average of health workers for each 100,000 people and has a smaller portion of its workforce -- 7.7 percent -- devoted to public health work than the national average of a 8.8 percent.
The program is expected to enroll six doctoral candidates in its first year. That should grow to 30 candidates by the end of the third year.
According to the university, it will not cost anything to set up the degree program.
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Congratulations!
SkIO graduate student Alex Rao receives PhD from Georgia Tech |
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Congratulations to Alexandra Rao upon the completion of her Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in December 2006. Alex's thesis title was "Carbon and Nitrogen Cycling in Permeable Continental Shelf Sediments and Porewater Exchange across the Sediment-Water Interface." All of her laboratory experiments and field research efforts were conducted at Skidaway Institute of Oceanography (SkIO); SkIO professor, Richard Jahnke, served as her thesis advisor. Other committee members included Dr. Jay Brandes of SkIO, Drs. Ellery Ingall and Martial Taillefert of Georgia Tech and Drs. Markus Huettel and Flip Froelich of Florida State University. Alex has accepted a postdoctoral position at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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 Black Sea Bass for the Sushi Market
One of our professors is experimenting with raising black sea bass for the sushi market in a “mariculture” setting. What he is doing differently is also raising tilapia and feeding the baby tilapia to the sea bass. The bass are apparently growing to market size in about half the time as using traditional food-pellet methods. Also less waste. When the bass gobble the small tilapia, they eat them whole. There are no remnants sinking to the bottom of the tank. At the same time, he is using the waste water from the tilapia tank to fertilize a hydroponic garden.
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 Coastal Water Quality Declining
One of our professors has been measuring the quality of the water in Georgia’s inshore waters for almost 20 years. Specifically, his measurements are of the Skidaway River, although his results match up with other measurements up and down the coast. Over that time he has found that the level of “nutrients” from sources like fertilizer, sewage plants, etc has increased steadily as has the level of algae (phytoplankton.) The level of dissolved oxygen has declined. While all this has been happening, the area fishermen’s catches of shrimp, crab and “desirable” fish has been declining. He is not ready to say that Georgia’s coastal waters are about to turn into Chesapeake Bay just yet, but he does say this is a troubling trend that needs to be addressed.
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 Coastal Radar System
One of our latest developments is the installation of a high frequency, low power radar system on St. Catherine’s Island. Working in conjunction with another identical system near Beaufort, SC, the radar is able to map ocean currents off the Georgia/South Carolina coast to a range of over 200 km. The coastal shelf is very wide here, but it gets out into the Gulf Stream. The system will create a map with hundreds of “data points” which are updated twice an hour. There are some practical applications to this, tracking chemical spills, search and rescue, etc. However, the real purpose is more in the realm of pure science. Movement of water affects all kinds of things, animal, plant and mineral. What is happening in coastal waters? How and where material is transported along and across the coastal shelf? How does this affect issues such as nutrients or the marine life which spend their immature life in the salt marshes but their adult hood in the open water. Etc.
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 Real Time Constant Ocean Observation
The radar system is part of a larger, ongoing effort to develop a system of real-time, constant ocean observation. This is a growing field in oceanography. One simple aspect of it would be tsunami warning systems that were a hot topic of discussion last winter. Skidaway Institute is heavily involved in this field through our partnership with the US Navy in the SABSOON (South Atlantic Bight Synoptic Ocean Observation Network) towers off the Georgia coast. Skidaway has placed meteorological and oceanographic monitoring equipment on the top of three towers and in the water beneath them. These systems monitor a multitude of different conditions, ranging from wind speed to ocean current and salinity. It is transmitted back to land via a microwave signal, stored digitally and available for anyone with internet access. From time to time, we send crews out to maintain this equipment and we can sometimes arrange for visitors to “hitch a ride” on the helicopter. We just need to set it up. (This is not easy to schedule because we don’t just have a helicopter on stand-by. Due to the expensive cost of the helicopter trip, we would need to coordinate with a flight that was going out for another reason and had available room, etc.) Also, related to that, our assistant director, Rick Jahnke (yahn-key) is the director of a national program, ORION, which is working to establish a global network of monitoring stations like this. We have people who can speak about the local view as well as the national/global perspective. Additional info on these programs can be obtained at: http://www.skio.usg.edu/research2/sabsoon/ .
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