|
|
|
|
Sept
09, 2002
|
an
online newsletter for and by NOAA employees
|
|
Latest CREWS Tilts With Wind & Waves Featuring a radically new design, a coral reef monitoring station was recently installed 
by NOAA scientists in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Designed to establish long-term
data sets for environmental conditions, the station is the second installed
as part of the Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) network. The new
design will be the basis of future CREWS stations installed throughout the
Caribbean and Pacific. "We're very pleased with our new design, but we've already got some great new design ideas to try on our next station going up in St. Thomas this year," said Jim Hendee, NOAA's principle investigator in charge of the CREWS network installation. "We're continually refining the CREWS stations. By the time we get to Puerto Rico, we'll probably have an even better design." Located in the National Park Service's Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve in St. Croix, the new coral reef monitoring station was designed, created and deployed by NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. CREWS' technology incorporates artificial intelligence software to analyze in situ measurements of the atmospheric and oceanic conditions at strategic coral reef locations. CREWS stations provide near real-time information products for use in coral bleaching alerts, and verify sea-surface temperatures from NOAA satellite products used for coral bleaching predictions.  The
new design features a long fiberglass piling anchored by a ball-and-socket
joint at a depth of 20 feet. Dynamic chain rigging and synthetic line allows
flexibility in response to daily wave action and tidal excursion, similar
to a shock absorber. The design is also built to withstand tropical-storm-force
winds. The piling could simply tilt with extreme wind and waves while remaining
anchored to the sea floor, greatly minimizing the chance of damage to surrounding
benthic communities, while enhancing the station's survivability. Scientists from AOML worked with a naval architect to carefully re-engineer instrument locations. Oceanographic instruments float on a secure ring that maintains a constant depth of one meter, rising and falling with waves and tide. Atmospheric instruments are located on a platform at a height of five meters (about 15 feet) to measure the critical air mass right above the ocean while mast-mounted anemometers at ten meters (about 30 feet) accurately measure wind speed and direction. Each platform can be raised or lowered by hand, permitting routine maintenance from a small support vessel.
CREWS stations will be installed near all major coral reefs in the United States, including Puerto Rico, Hawaii, American Samoa and Guam. The first CREWS station, installed in 2001, is located near the Caribbean Marine Research Center at Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas. For more about CREWS: http://www.coral.noaa.gov/crw For information about NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
