Mobile Bay Tool

The Team: Brian Dzwonkowski (Lead Investigator, University of South Alabama, Dauphin Island Sea Lab) and Renee Collini (Mississippi State University)

Technical Monitor: Grace Gray (grace.gray@noaa.gov)

Federal Program Officer/Point of Contact: Frank Parker (frank.parker@noaa.gov)

This project began in June 2017 and ended in May 2021.

Award Amount: $720,000

Why it matters: Effective management of coastal estuaries requires real-time and historical knowledge of water quality such as salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and water clarity. Resource managers and stakeholders can use web-based tools that integrate this water quality data to inform decision-making in coastal waters such as when to close oyster harvesting areas due to poor water quality. Unfortunately, many Gulf of Mexico coastal regions lack web-based tools that effectively integrate available real-time and historical water quality data. However, decision-makers in Alabama have access to the Alabama Real-time Coastal Observing System (ARCOS) which provides high-quality, system wide, continuous real-time water and weather observations in a user-friendly web-based portal (https://arcos.disl.org/).

What the team did: The work conducted extended the spatial and temporal coverage for ARCOS and added more measures of water quality. This enhanced the usefulness of ARCOS for resource managers by providing them with additional information critical to making decisions about living coastal and marine resources in coastal Alabama. Specifically, the improvements to the ARCOS network included upgrading four older observing stations to enhance reliability and provide real-time water clarity data, and adding offshore real-time measurements of salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen by upgrading an existing data collection site.

Summary of Outcome: This project was focused on revitalizing the Alabama Real-time Coastal Observing System (ARCOS), a decision-support network, used by many regional stakeholders. To this effect the project modernized four of the seven inshore stations by upgrading the hydrographic sensor instrumentation, including expanding the networks monitoring capacity to include turbidity. These data were collected and delivered in real-time to the ARCOS website throughout the life of the project so that our wide range of stakeholders had immediate access to the information. In addition, the project expanded the spatial extent of ARCOS by bringing an existing offline research site (16 km offshore of Dauphin Island) into the network. The effort involved developing a mooring system that would collect surface and bottom water quality data and deliver it in near-real-time to the ARCOS website. The collection and delivery of bottom dissolved oxygen on the shelf of the Mississippi Bight was first of its kind in the region and a critical stream of new information for assessing the susceptibility of the Mississippi Bight to hypoxic, an open question in the northern Gulf of Mexico. As a part of this expansion, the website for ARCOS (formerly www.mymobilebay.com) was redesigned (https://arcos.disl.org/) to improve the user experience as well as improve the visibility of the network through the Dauphin Island Sea Lab webpage. 

The historical nature of ARCOS allowed the project to begin with an established group of stakeholders in government agencies, academic institutions, commercial and industrial organizations, and a general recreational user community. However, growing stakeholder interest and potentially expanding the user community through the development of new applications was a natural way to promote the importance of this network as a tool for coastal decision-making. A particularly notable example of such new applications was developed from recognizing the importance of oceanic conditions in tropical storm forecasting. Data from the network was demonstrated to be useful in helping to identify conditions likely to support hurricane intensification prior to landfall. In short, the compounding impacts of a tropical storm (which mixes surface heat downward) followed by an atmospheric heatwave (which reheats the upper ocean) was critical to producing extreme ocean heat content, i.e., fuel for hurricanes. These findings were published in Nature Communications and were covered by local, national, and international media outlets. The paper received exceptional media coverage ranking top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altimetric including articles by the National Geographic, The New York Times, The Guardian, numerous other science focused websites as well as featured by a United Nations disaster risk reduction website. In addition, regional news outlets covered this research during the 2020 hurricane season (e.g., https://youtu.be/_g05O0CL1B4; https://youtu.be/rfVYt3w9WAo?t=724) demonstrating interest from the local weather forecasting community (i.e., local stakeholders). Importantly, due to the extremely active 2020 hurricane season, we reached out to the local, regional, and national weather service community to make them aware of these findings and how the ARCOS network could be used to improve hurricane intensity expectations prior to landfall in the Mississippi Bight region. 

Finally, the expansion and revitalization of ARCOS that this project provided has positioned the network to continue collecting data so that the stakeholders will have this decision support tool available to them well beyond the life of this project.