Chesapeake Community Modeling Program

CCMP Newsletter | April 2011

Volume 4, Issue 2

Introduction

Spring has finally arrived here in the Chesapeake region. CCMP has a lot going on this spring including our Steering Committee meeting this May and a Hydrodynamic Model Workshop in June. You can read all about these events below. Also in this issue, our featured model is WRF and our featured modeler is Courtney Harris of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science.

As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, please let us know!

Contents

1. CCMP News in brief
2. Open Source on the March
3. Featured Modeler: Courtney Harris
4. Featured Model: WRF
5. Upcoming Meetings

1. CCMP News in Brief

Agenda Set for June Hydrodynamic Modeling Workshop

A joint CCMP, CSDMS, CBP, and US IOOS Modeling Testbed and Chesapeake STAC Hydrodynamic Modeling Workshop will be convened at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, June 9-10, 2011. The purpose of this workshop will be to review state-of-the-art coastal and estuarine hydrodynamic modeling and compare the strengths and weaknesses of different model grids and their ability to simulate physical properties such as temperature and salinity variability and stratification.

The agenda for the workshop is listed below.

Day 1

• Introduction, Raleigh Hood, UMCES
• CBP Model Need, Lewis Linker, CBPO
• US IOOS Modeling Testbed Comparisons: Stratification and DO, Marjy Friedrichs, VIMS
• Delaware River and Bay Model Evaluation Experiment, Rich Patchen, NOAA
• CH3D, Carl Cerco, USACE
• FVCOM, Changsheng Chen, UMASSD
• EFDC, Jian Shen, VIMS
• ECOMSED, Nickitas Georgas, SIT
• ADH, Gaurav Savant, USACE
• ROMS Jiangtao Xu, NOAA

Day 2

• Estuarine Turbidity Modeling, Neil Ganju, USGS
• Coastal Shelf Influences on Chesapeake Bay, from a Modeling Perspective Wen Long, UMCES
• Estuarine Turbulence Modeling, Malcolm Scully, ODU
• Modular Modeling Approaches, Scott Peckham, CSDMS
• Panel Discussion, Dom Di Toro, UDelaware & Carl Friedrichs, VIMS
• Wrap-up, Raleigh Hood, UMCES

Workshop participation is by invitation only. If you have any questions, please contact Dave Jasinski

CCMP SC Meeting May 16

The CCMP Steering Committee will be meeting May 16th, 2011 at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. The meeting is open to all and if you are interested in attending, please contact Dave Jasinski.

CBEO Website Updates

The website for the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Observatory (CBEO) has undergone some extensive updates recently. The presentations page has been reformatted to allow viewing of many of the presentations right on the page. The publications page has been updated with the most recent CBEO related documents. An interactive timeline has been added that allows you to see the meetings and events that CBEO project members have participated in from the beginning of the project to present. Also, many of the data analysis tools developed during the project are now available directly from the webpage under the "Resources" tab. Please take a minute and check it out.

2. Open Source on the March

NASA Open Source Summit

NASA held it’s first open source summit (OSS) March 29 & 30, 2011 at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The goal of the summit was to move beyond abstract discussion to produce actionable solutions to open source challenges faced by NASA. The event was facilitated by Wayne Moses and Lucas Cioffi of the Open Forum Foundation. The summit featured both physical participation on site and virtual participation through live streaming and electronic discussion. You can visit the OSS webpage to view the agenda and see the presentations.

3. Featured Modeler: Courtney Harris

Virginia Institute of Marine Science
College of William and Mary
PO Box 1346
Gloucester Point, VA 23062

Education:
- 1986 B.S., University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Applied Mathematics.
- 1987 M.S., University of California, Berkeley, CA. School of Engineering. Operations Research.
- 1994 M.S., University of Virginia College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Environmental Sciences, Charlottesville, VA.
- 1999 Ph.D., University of Virginia College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Environmental Sciences, Charlottesville, VA.

Courtney is an Associate Professor in the School of Marine Sciences at Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, College of William and Mary. Her research focus is on quantifying and predicting sediment transport in estuaries and on continental shelves over a variety of temporal and spatial scales. Courtney has been involved in interdisciplinary projects that consider interactions between shelf sediment transport and small-scale stratigraphy, sediment budgets, geochemistry, coastal oceanography, and climatology. Many of these studies have been associated with large experiments that has involved collaborations with field oceanographers and geologists.

Courtney’s current research projects include (1) evaluating the role that physical processes play in determining spatial and temporal patterns of erodibility within the York River Estuary; (2) developing and using numerical models to quantify sediment processes within the northern Gulf of Mexico; and (3) identifying the oceanographic transport processes that impact sediment transport off shore of the North Island, NZ. Her research philosophy is that we can make the most rapid progress by building models and tools that are available to the research community as a whole, i.e., that are open source. Along these lines, Courtney has been active in a group of oceanographers and geologists who are working to develop a community sediment transport model by developing and testing numerical models that account for sediment transport and oceanographic circulation. (The Community Model for Coastal Sediment Transport, see: http://woodshole.er.usgs.gov/project-pages/sediment-transport/)

Although Courtney’s research extends to many coastal and estuarine systems beyond Chesapeake Bay both in the US and internationally, she has also made important contributions locally, for example, to the implementation of a new sediment transport model in the Chesapeake Bay Program’s modeling system.

4. Featured Model: Weather Research and Forecasting Model - WRF

Our featured model this month is the Weather Research and Forecasting model or WRF. WRF was developed as a collaborative effort between National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Oklahoma, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). WRF is an atmospheric simulation system designed for researching forecasting and hurricanes, conducting idealized simulations, numerical weather prediction, and teaching among other things. WRF is in the public domain and has a large community of code contributors. It is in use world-wide and boasts a registered user group of over 6000 individuals. A new version of the model (version 3.3) was released at the beginning of April. An interesting feature of WRF is that it can be run on large-scale parallel systems or on a laptop.

There are several sites devoted to the WRF user community but the most informative from an introductory standpoint is the WRF users page - http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/. Here, you can download the model, access documentation and publications, interact on the users forum, and get real-time WRF forecasts.

5. Upcoming Meetings

Thirteenth Annual Treasure the Chesapeake Celebration

Annapolis Marriott Waterfront - May 20, 2011 link

June 2011 STAC Quarterly Meeting

June 7 & 8, 2011 link

12th Annual WRF Users’ Event

June 20-24, 2011 http://www.mmm.ucar.edu/events/2011_wrfusers/index.php

ISESS 2011 - the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems

June 27-29, 2011 http://www.isess2011.org/

NCER 4th National Conference on Ecosystem Restoration

August 1 – 5, 2011, Baltimore, MD - http://conference.ifas.ufl.edu/NCER2011/index.html

EMECS 9 Global Summit on Coastal Seas

August 28 – 31, 2011, Baltimore, MD - http://www.conference.ifas.ufl.edu/EMECS9/

Chesapeake Community Model Program
http://ches.communitymodeling.org/
Chesapeake Research Consortium
Edgewater, MD
410-798-1283