Chesapeake Bay Remote Sensing Program:
An Education and Outreach Initiative
During the last decade, scientists have been using a variety of new approaches for measuring key properties of Chesapeake Bay. These approaches include instrumented buoys for continuous monitoring of weather conditions, salinity, temperature, and currents and remote sensing from aircraft and satellites for determining biological attributes of the Bay that respond to nutrient loading. Using these new technologies, our understanding of seasonal and interannual cycles of physical circulation, water quality, and plankton dynamics has improved significantly. The data on which these findings depend come from sensors placed on buoys of the Chesapeake Bay Observing System (CBOS – www.cbos.org) and from ocean color sensors that can measure Bay-wide chlorophyll concentrations as an index of nutrient loading (noaa.chesapeakebay.net). To date, scientists have been the primary users of these data, though there is a broader potential use by resource managers, teachers, students, journalists, and others interested in Bay issues. This project is designed to adapt the data products from new technologies and to disseminate results to such users by employing web sites that provide visualizations of the observed data together with descriptions of historical and more recent patterns. The data from buoys and aircraft should be especially attractive as tools for education through real-time presentations that use sophisticated methods of data collection and give a connection to actual conditions in the Bay.
Data from the Ocean Data Acquisition System (ODAS) is available by anonymous ftp at ftp://www.mdsg.umd.edu/Public/his_chl.
More information about remote sensing is available at Chesapeake Bay Remote Sensing, part of the Bay Science Gateway.
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Lawrence W. Harding, Jr.
Horn Point Laboratory
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
and Maryland Sea Grant
William C. Boicourt and Thomas C. Malone
Horn Point Laboratory
University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science
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