April 2014

Cooperative Institute for the North Atlantic Region (CINAR) researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) collaborated with the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) to integrate continuous automated microscopic analysis of plankton with a recent Ecosystem Monitoring (EcoMon) program cruise aboard the R/V Okeanos Explorer. The successful deployment produced millions of high resolution plankton images that are providing taxon-specific information about spatial distribution patterns in waters of southern New England and the Gulf of Maine.

Background: Traditional sampling approaches for characterizing plankton are so labor intensive and time-consuming that this kind of information is available only with very limited resolution. New technology developed at WHOI provides a solution that not only meets research needs, but can also contribute to resource management and science-based decision making. Imaging FlowCytobot (IFCB) combines flow cytometry and video imaging technologies in a submersible instrument that can be operated unattended for many months, producing thousands of high resolution microscope images of planktonic organisms every hour. When combined with automated analysis and classification approaches, this observational capability provides unprecedented characterization of the base of the marine food web, including harmful algal bloom (HAB) species. With appropriate transition, IFCB technology (now commercially available; McLane Research Laboratories, Inc.) could be incorporated as a routine component of EcoMon and other regional surveys as an on-board, flow-through system, reducing manual labor and providing more detailed and more highly resolved observations.

Significance: This research project paves the way for more efficient and detailed characterization of status and change in lower trophic levels, a critical element of monitoring that supports an Integrated Ecosystem Assessment (IEA) approach for resource management. As such, this research is aligned with NOAA’s Strategic Plan goal of improved understanding of ecosystems to inform resource management decisions.

Contact Information: Dr. Heidi M. Sosik, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

http://ifcb-data.whoi.edu/OkeanosExplorerAug2013_IFCB010

http://www.mclanelabs.com/master_page/product-type/samplers/imaging-flowcytobot

Researchers from the Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) recently published a study in the international “Advances in Meteorology” journal highlighting important advances toward making storm-scale forecasts of supercells.  Researchers conducted two storm-scale experiments using model jumping off points from either a fixed physics (same sets of physics schemes) or a multiple physics (different combinations of physics schemes) mesoscale ensemble system to see which method better predicts a tornadic supercell storm. Their results show that the ensemble with jumping off points from the multiple physics ensemble forecast provides more realistic forecasts of the significant tornado parameter, dry line structure, and near surface variables. The probabilities of strong low-level updraft helicity from the multiple physics ensemble forecast correlate better with observed tornado and rotation tracks than probabilities from fixed physics ensemble forecast. 

Background: Researchers from the Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) recently published “The Impact of Mesoscale Environmental Uncertainty on the Prediction of a Tornadic Supercell Storm Using Ensemble Data Assimilation Approach” in the international Advances in Meteorology journal. To view article, click here.. 

Significance: This work suggests that incorporating physics diversity across the ensemble can be important to successful probabilistic storm-scale forecast of supercell thunderstorms, which is the main goal of NOAA’s Warn-on-Forecast initiative.