Leonard Pietrafesa

Brief Project Summary: Coastal Carolina University (CCU), Clemson University, North Carolina State University (NCSU) and the Savannah River National Laboratory will investigate the strength, persistence and viability of marine energy sources in northern (and eastern) South Carolina coastal and inshore waters. The scoping study will take three approaches: 1) the establishment of an observing network that will measure winds, wave, tide and current energies at six offshore locations in two lines and water level and winds at two locations at the beginning of the two lines and in a coastal embayment; 2) an assessment of observed energy as a function of physical process as observed; and 3) an advanced numerical modeling assessment of the energy sources. The field component feasibility study will consist of a real time reporting ocean and atmospheric observational network, real time data recovery and data assessments. The instruments and sensors will be provided by NCSU and the system and sensors will be prepped at both NCSU and CCU with the field program to be staged out of CCU. Equipment to be utilized in the project will derive from an NCSU equipment inventory for projects previously supported by the US Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation, all in the name of L.J. Pietrafesa as the PI of each of those prior sponsored programs. This proposed program will utilize existing federally funded assets in keeping with federal agency best practices. It is anticipated that archived and real time environmental data will be used to validate numerical model output and eventually to be assimilated into NOAA, ONR and NCAR developed and NCSU adopted diagnostic and prognostic numerical models that will be packaged to be utilized to conduct the energy assessments. This initial deployment represents a considerable potential resource for supporting other associated data gathering needs that can be expected to accompany future permitting and implementation. The team will also take best take advantage of the offshore infrastructure and associated transits to the sites to conduct multi-beam surveys to assess scour, and biological activity using bottom mounted ?fish-cams? etc.

It was the impact of hurricane Floyd that led Sea Grant and the NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) to initiate the CI-FLOW project in the Tar River basin of eastern North Carolina. As hurricane Katrina demonstrated this summer, the need for accurate rainfall estimation and coupled riverine flood and coastal storm surge modeling has not diminished. This proposal, linked and coordinated with similar proposals from the North Carolina and Texas Sea Grant programs, seeks to contribute to the completion of the CI-FLOW project in North Carolina and expand that work in applications on the North Carolina coastal plain.

Coastal Carolina University (CCU), Clemson University, North Carolina State University (NCSU), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Savannah River National Laboratory will investigate the strength, persistence and viability of coastal energy sources in northern (and eastern) South Carolina. This investigation will adopt three approaches: 1) the establishment of an observing network measuring surface wind, wave, tide and current energies at six offshore locations in two co-linear arrays and water level and winds at two locations at the beginning of the arrays; 2) an assessment of observed energy as a function of the observed physical processes; and 3) an advanced numerical modeling to assess observations and the energy sources. The field component consists of a real-time reporting of ocean and atmospheric observations, real-time data recovery, data assimilation into deterministic and statistical models. Product delivery will serve two purposes: to provide actual realizations of physical energy containing processes and to validate the numerical model output at specific, concurrent locations The instruments and sensors will be provided by NCSU and the system and sensors will be prepped at both NCSU and CCU with the field program to be staged out of CCU. Equipment to be utilized in the project will derive from an NCSU equipment inventory for projects previously supported by the US Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Science Foundation all in the name of L.J. Pietrafesa as the PI of each of those prior sponsored programs. This proposed program will utilize existing federally funded assets in keeping with federal agency best practices. The real-time environmental data will be assimilated into diagnostic and prognostic numerical models to conduct energy assessments. These models have been developed, adopted, and packaged together by NOAA, ONR, NCAR, and NCSU. Off-shore atmospheric visibility will be measured to address aviary concerns. Bio-fouling will be qualitatively monitored by season and location to provide assessment to the sponsor of this study. This deployment represents a considerable potential resource for supporting other associated data gathering needs that are expected to accompany future permitting and implementation. As a result, the team will seek additional partnerships and funding as possible to best take advantage of the offshore infrastructure and associated transits to the sites (i.e. multi-beam surveys to assess scour, bottom ?fish-cams? etc.)

The Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center (ESSIC) will embark on a two-year demonstration project to build the Chesapeake Bay Forecast System (CBFS). CBFS will consist of a regional coupled atmosphere, the Weather Research Forecast (WRF), land, Land Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) and ocean, Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) model components, complete with ecosystem and biogeochemistry elements to enable near-real time applications; with a focus on climate change and ecosystem impacts research. The North Carolina State University (NCSU) team identified on the cover page has been working on developing an air-sea-coastal-estuary coupled model system. There are three separate but coupled components to the proposed efforts. They include: the development of the Coupled WRF/ROMS/SWAT Modeling System for the Chesapeake Bay; the development of the SWAN/ROMS wave current interactively coupled model for the Chesapeake Bay System; the hydrodynamic response of Chesapeake Bay to extreme external forcing.

The overall goal of INFORM is to characterize and understand measured impacts and to predict future impacts of global climate variability and change in weather (delivery system) events and to use this knowledge to facilitate the formulation of optimal decisions and best policy for adaptation to, and exploitation of, the projected climate conditions and their uncertainties. There will be an overarching principal targeted area of research and applications, with the necessary sub-domains, which collectively form an integrated regional impact assessment strategy for coastal erosion and ecological impacts. They embrace: designing sea level change scenarios; frequency of occurrence and depiction of extreme weather and coastal response scenarios; regional sea level variability and response; coastal inundation and flooding and salt water intrusion; inland flooding; ecological response; process studies and model verification; social and economic impacts and adaptation; integrating natural system and human system impacts and developing place-based risk, vulnerability, and resilience indices; forecasting tropical cyclone frequency of occurrence and impacts; forecasting extra-tropical cyclone frequency of occurrence and impacts; creating new coastal erosion risk indices to be easily communicated to emergency managers and the public; and creating operational tools and providing service and outreach in concert with the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center and via the INFORM Web Site. All of the sub-projects will run contemporaneously. As suggested, the NOAA goal areas of weather, water, climate, ecosystems and societal impacts and commerce are all dealt with in this proposed project. The measure of success of INFORM is the degree to which scientific research results are transformed into information and services of value for policy guidance and development for stakeholders. While INFORM has interests which span United States coastal states, including Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific, the Great Lakes, Alaska and Hawaii, it will concentrate on sub-regional impacts on coastal erosion from Virginia to Georgia as relates to the generic portability of the advances that we make in conducting diagnostic and prognostic modeling of coastal erosion and its impacts related to hurricane and extra-tropical storm events, individually and in clusters. This is a reduced proposal to focus on sea level rise and potential coastal erosion as a function of future tropical and extra-tropical cyclone seasons in the extended sub-region of the Carolinas, Virginia and Georgia. This proposed one year project meets the vision of NOAA to develop a more complete understanding of the oceans, atmosphere and coastal environs to make more informed societal decisions in the context of the NOAA mission to understand and predict changes in the planetary environment as they relate to conserving and managing coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation?s economic, social and environmental needs. In this sub-proposal of the NCSU Inform proposal, we will focus on Coastal Erosion in the face of Sea Level Rise and future Tropical and Extra-Tropical Storms.

The Coastal, Inland FLooding Observation and Warning (CI-FLOW) Project consortium requests $45K in for implementing and validating an integrated salinity modeling system extending from the headwaters of the Tar River to the Atlantic Ocean. This cross-Line Office, multi-university collaborative proposal directly addresses NOAA Integrated Water Resource Services (IWRS) effort, is a major component of the Coastal Estuary River Information System (CERIS), and is fully supported by the ?NOAA in the Carolinas? consortium. The modeling environment will initially include the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Estuary-Lower River Flood model to provide salinity information in the coastal/tidal zone, inlets, Pamlico Sound, and the Tar-Pamlico and Neuse Rivers up to their headwaters. Output from this model will be used in inland stream flow simulations provided by the TREX distributed hydrologic model running at NSSL and the National Weather Service?s (NWS) distributed hydrologic model. This integrated modeling framework will take advantage of high-resolution precipitation information from the National Severe Storms Laboratory?s (NSSL) Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (QPE) Q2 system and high-resolution state-of the science meteorological information produced by the Weather Research Forecast (WRF) model to increase the accuracy and resolution of hydrologic simulations for the Carolina research area. The scope and significance of external demands on our coastal watersheds necessitates innovative strategies and proactive approaches be used to mitigate the social and economic impacts leading toward hazard resilient coastal communities. This activity will augment existing efforts underway in the CI-FLOW project, a demonstration research activity originally funded by OAR?s Sea Grant Program. The CI-FLOW project is facilitating the evaluation and testing of new technologies and techniques to produce accurate and timely identification of coastal, estuary and inland floods, flash floods and their impacts on the coastal ecosystem. Consistent with the project goals of CI-FLOW, this proposed activity will facilitate the development and integration of a watershed and an estuarine water quality modeling system on the Tar-Pamlico River Basin in North Carolina by creating the generic mathematical couplings necessary for the investigation of the responses of primary ecosystem parameters to flooding and water quality events. This component will focus on salinity; particularly those that represent significantly different precipitation regimes.

This is a continuation of an ongoing NOAA project on the development of a Research-Grade Air Quality Forecasting system based on Weather Research and Forecast Model (i.e., WRFAQCV1-MADRID or WRF-MADRID).

The Carolinas Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction System (Caro-COOPS) NCSU Year III Responsibilities are to: monitor climate variability at the regional scale of the Carolinas; monitor the weather of the coastal atmosphere, coastal ocean and estuaries of the Carolinas; monitor and model estuarine and coastal ocean phenomena in the Carolinas; demonstrate the capability to provide real-time data from the observational network routinely; provide ?experimental predictions? of water levels, winds and waves; make the observational data available to federal and state agencies and the general public in ?near-real? time; and make added value products available to the public, particularly museums and other public places. At the heart of the climate and event experimental prediction grand challenge is a backbone observational network that transmits the in-situ observations in near-real time (at 1 hour intervals) back to land based stations (USC, NCSU). These data and model results will be utilized to: ? detect and track the signal of climate variability at regional scales, ? detect and track the signals of weather events at regional scales ? conduct observational simulation experiments for hind cast verification of the program?s developing numerical environmental modeling system, ? use the observational data and information and experimental predictions to provide better information about impending and future environmental events and conditions ? support management of living resources and marine ecosystems, ? facilitate safe and efficient marine operations and ensure national security, ? enable the public to better plan for, deal with mitigate against impending and future environmental events and conditions, especially those that are considered deleterious hazards ? detect, document and determine the temporal variability and spatial distributions of offshore, alongshore and coastal sources and sinks of nutrients in the Carolinas ? predict storm surge and flood inundation along the Carolinas coastline and in and surrounding Charleston Harbor, the Albemarle-Pamlico Sound System, Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head ? develop a data assimilation capability for the model system

This effort is a continuation of NCSU's involvement in the CORMP program to establish an integrated Coastal Ocean Observation and Prediction System (COOPS) for the Onslow bay, Long Bay and Cape Fear regions through the: 1) deployment of a backbone array of CORMP funded, NCSU designed new, real time Iridium satellite communication based mooring systems, consistent with IOOS and COTS, fully complementary to the Caro-COOPS array and supportive of SEACOOS, CLION and SABSOON and to complement NOAA, CLION and ACE installations; 2) development of an integrated hydrodynamic and ecological modeling and model validation system for the Cape Fear Region (CFR) as an extension of the current NCSU CORMP modeling effort, and complementary to NCSU modeling for Caro-COOPS; The longer term goal of the NCSU modeling effort is to develop the integrated "Cape Fear Region (CFR) Coastal Ocean Prediction System" to support the overall goal and objectives of CORMP. Improved model data serves to support the need of other subprojects of CORMP. Year 2006-07 will focus on the further development of the integrated CFR Prediction system.

This proposed effort is the natural extension of NCSU?s involvement in the CORMP program: to continue collecting moored array data at selected locations; to further the establishment of the NCSU designed real time moored observational array, consistent with IOOS and COTS fully complementary to the Caro-COOPS array and supportive of SEACOOS, CLION and SABSOON and to complement NOAA, CLION and ACE installations; to more fully establish the modeling component of CORMP as a natural extension of the past year of NCSU CORMP modeling and complementary to NCSU modeling for Caro-COOPS and as an integral part of the regional coastal ocean and climate prediction and downscaling system being created in CWISE; and to validate the model output for the Cape Fear River Estuary system. This revised proposal documents the NCSU proposed CORMP observational mooring and associated modeling plans in keeping with personnel and resource allocations. It also details the relationships between CORMP and Caro-COOPS observational and modeling complementarities and the relationship of both to CWISE. Caro-COOPS is in its 3rd full year of modeling. Caro-COOPS observations have completed their 1st year of troubleshooting and assessment and will be redeployed in late Summer 2004 to be fully operational and real-time. CORMP NCSU mooring observations have just completed their 3rd full year and are conventional taut wire, bottom mounted moorings in NCSU designed and built, intellectual property protected housings. CORMP project year 2004-05 for NCSU is intended to be a year of continued non-real time moorings at several model strategic locations and of the onset of the real timing of two of the moorings in Onslow Bay. Caro-COOPS and CORMP will both derive data from a mooring array transect in upper Long Bay that is common to both South and North Carolina. NCSU personnel will design, order materials and equipment, and construct, calibrate, deploy, maintain, recover, refurbish, calibrate, and redeploy all NCSU mooring equipment, both present taut wire and bottom mounted and real time, at the level of technical support. NCSU will conduct quality assessments and control of the data. The array will take advantage of the state of the technology in real time two-way, interrogative recording and recovery of oceanographic and atmospheric data that has been adopted, and developed by NCSU. Additionally, the science of data assimilation into NCSU models is being advanced by Caro-COOPS and CORMP will benefit from this pioneering effort, as appropriate. All lessons learned from real timing of moorings in Caro-COOPS, the leading edge program in the SE for interactive real time moorings, will be of benefit to CORMP. All mooring data will be collected and used to document both high frequency event and low frequency scale signals; in keeping with the goals and objectives of IOOS, COTS and CWISE. NCSU will conduct modeling in keeping with IOOS and COTS objectives, UNCW needs and resource allocation. NCSU will employ data from the real time observing network in as well as conduct hind-cast and diagnostic assessments of hydrodynamic impacts. NCSU will conduct model validation for the Cape Fear River System by deploying stand-alone instruments, to be supplied by NCSU, for periods of time sufficient to detect a complete spectrum of dominant signals, as determined by the NCSU PI.