Prototype System for Multidisciplinary Shared Cyberinfrastructure: Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory

Abstract

A prototype system for a Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) is under development by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from the domains of environmental engineering, marine science, hydrology, ecology, and computer science. The vision is to provide new means of coupling and synthesizing field sampled and model generated data in a way that will open up new data sources to researchers and managers interested in understanding and resolving some currently unanswered questions and problems concerning hypoxia in the Chesapeake Bay. It will do so by developing advanced cyberinfrastructure to provide uniform nationwide access to new tools and a wide variety of data of disparate type, scale, and resolution, in both spatial and temporal domains, including model-derived data from past runs of major computational models for Chesapeake Bay hydrodynamics and water quality. Some key goals of the prototype project are to resolve the existing data source heterogeneities such that all relevant data are ac...