Project Details

2021 - 2022

The NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Pioneer Coastal Array will be relocated to the Southern Mid-Atlantic Bight (S-MAB) in 2024. The geographic footprint of the relocated array that was championed during the NSF-sponsored Pioneer Array Innovations Labs is the region between Cape Hatteras, NC, and Norfolk Canyon, VA. This region offers opportunities to collect ocean observations in support of numerous interdisciplinary science topics including cross-shelf exchange, air-sea interaction, land-sea interactions associated with large estuarine systems, and ecosystem and carbon cycle processes. It also offers opportunities to develop strong partnerships with stakeholders in academic, government, and industry sectors, including marine fisheries and offshore renewable energy (wind and hydrokinetic).

To address these questions, the scope of the S-MAB Pioneer Array needs to be broad enough to cover natural system components such as land-estuary-shelf-ocean interactions, canyon dynamics, local and remote forcing, and extreme events, yet narrow enough to resolve important interactions at short length and time scales. Fixed observing elements, i.e., moorings and their associated sensor suites, must be placed judiciously to capture variability across the relevant geographic scope of the S-MAB, but sufficiently proximate to each other to constitute a coherent array.

Therefore, investigators from North Carolina State University (He) and Rutgers University (Wilkin) propose a RAPID project to conduct a modeling investigation, working in concert with the OOI-CGSN team to address relocation information needs.

The effort we propose will perform a suite of numerical modeling investigations and analyses during November 2021 to October 2022 to deliver actionable guidance to the OOI-CGSN Pioneer Array system design and build group that meets their published milestones/constraints for the design and build-out timeline.