Project Leader:Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski

Project Details

Primary Research Areas: The proposed project will investigate interactions between marine heatwaves, tropical cyclones, and climate modes, which addresses fundamental questions related to air-sea interaction and is directly related to a primary scientific goal of the NASA physical oceanography program by improving the ‘understanding of the ocean’s role in climate variability and its prediction’. Broadening the understanding of the role of the coastal ocean and its associated air-sea couplings in generating extreme events (i.e., marine heatwaves and tropical storm intensification) is critical information needed to improve modeling and prediction efforts. Thus, this project is consistent with areas of research emphasized by the program call which states that ‘understanding and modeling the state of the coupled ocean-atmosphere system are fundamental to climate studies’. The project findings will enhance the capacity to predict extreme conditions, a significant area of need for risk analysis and vulnerability assessments in coastal communities.

Project Leader:Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski

Project Details

The project addresses overreaching research questions related to how and why hypoxic conditions change in response to both natural conditions and increased anthropogenic pressures present in the Alabama coastal waters. The study is identifying and improving the understanding of the structure, variability, and impacts of dissolved oxygen patterns in estuarine systems of Alabama.

Project Leader:Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski

Project Details Lead investigator involved in maintaining site CP, a long-term mooring site collect water column velocity and hydrographic data. This is one of the longest running high frequency hydrographic times series in coastal water of the Gulf of Mexico and has a tremendous potential for being a sentinel site for address anthropogenic impacts in the coastal zone (e.g., watershed urbanization, climate change issues). Interdisciplinary data from this have been used in a range of ways by numerous scientists.

Project Leader: Renee Collini, co-leader Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski

Project Details

NOAA RESTORE ACT Science Program - Expansion of www.mymobilebay.com for coastal Alabama resource management Project

Effective management of coastal estuaries requires real-time and historical knowledge of water quality such as salinity, temperature, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity. Unfortunately, many Gulf of Mexico coastal regions lack web-based tools that effectively integrate available water quality data so that resource managers and stakeholders can efficiently use incoming data to make information decision related to the marine environment (for example, closure of oyster harvesting areas).

Project Leader:JProject Leader: Monty Graham (University of Southern Mississippi)

Project Details

This project addresses how complex fine-scale structure and processes in coastal waters dominated by pulsed-river plumes control the exposure, impacts and ecosystem recovery from offshore oil spills. CONCORDE has been focused on understanding sub-surface modes of Oil Derived Substance transport and chemical change as it relates to organism exposure in coastal waters dominated by pulsed-river plumes.

A central component of this program is seasonal transects across the Mississippi Bight shelf with coupled biophysical measurements. This project represents an interdisciplinary, multi-institution research opportunity that is fostering new collaborations with institution across the U.S.

Project Leader:Dr. Just Cebrian

Project Details

The success of estuarine restoration efforts often depends on a range of interdisciplinary marine and fluvial process that interact in complex ways. Physical forcing is a critical factor in controlling the environmental conditions that biogeochemical and ecosystem processes must operate. Thus, a major consideration in estuarine restoration is the physical conditions at site locations due to their importance in determining whether biological organisms can survive and flourish. In order to inform the restoration effort in West Fowl River, Dr. Brian Dzwonkowski will focus on the following objectives:

Project Leader:National Estuarine Research Reserve System (NERRS), Grand Bay

Project Details

The project focuses on improving the understanding of water quality in Bangs Lake, a region effected by recurrent phosphate spills from an adjacent chemical plant. Dr. Dzwonkowski’s component of the project focuses on accurately describing circulation and dispersion processes in a shallow salt marsh system. This experiment involved tracking of a dye release, deployment of a short-term moorings (ADCP, CTDs, and ADVs), and the release of surface drifters.

Project Leader:John Reager (NASA JPL)

Project Details SMAP is a remote sensing observatory that carries two instruments that will map soil moisture and determine the freeze or thaw state of the same area being mapped.

This project is a collaboration with scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to explore the temporal and spatial domain of flood events and their impacts, encompassing both terrestrial and oceanic regions. The primary objective of the work will be to understand the mechanisms of flood generation and progression, and to characterize the contributors to land and ocean event severity. The secondary objective will be to examine if flood-driven ocean productivity events can be modeled and predicted with significant lead-time (~2-3 weeks) to offer utility in operational fisheries management as well as assess the quality of satellite-derived sea surface salinity and to potentially develop improved algorithms for determining SSS.

Project Leader: B. Dzwonkowski (PI), J. Lehrter, and D. Tian

Project Details

Shelf hypoxia is a well-recognized management issue for a growing number of coastal regions (Diaz and Rosenberg 2008) that can alter food web dynamics and biogeochemical cycling, resulting in threats to fisheries, coastal economies, and ecosystem health (Breitburg et al. 2009; Diaz and Rosenberg 2011). While hypoxia is often associated with excess nutrients delivered by freshwater inputs, a number of recent studies have indicated the interannual variability in physical forcing functions are as important (in some cases more important) than nutrient loading. Furthermore, there is limited understanding of the impact of extreme events on dissolved oxygen (DO) dynamics (e.g., tropical storms, marine heatwaves). Importantly, the summer season, when hypoxia is most common, has climatological patterns that present potential opportunities for known physical hypoxia stressors (e.g., bottom water temperature, stratification, upwelling favorable wind) to couple with themselves and/or with extreme events to amplify the properties and processes associated with low DO levels. As a result, understanding the coastal climate where multiple physical stressors can potentially couple to amplify environmental conditions conducive to hypoxia is critical for determining shelf vulnerability to this marine hazard.