Oceanography and Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology Commons^™

Urban Heat Island Expansion In The Greater Las Vegas Metropolitan Area, Alex Remar

Earth and Soil Sciences

The growth of human settlements into vast urban metropolitan areas is often accompanied by relatively higher temperatures in comparison with surrounding rural countrysides, a phenomenon known as the “urban heat island effect.” The city of Las Vegas has been selected as an examination of this trend because of its unprecedented urban growth in the last 50 years, which has been mapped by satellite imagery for several decades. Studying the growth of Las Vegas’ relatively new heat island can provide valuable insight into the causes and magnitude of all urban heat islands in general.

In this investigation, a series of temperature …

Sfa Weather Station-June 2010, Arthur Temple College Of Forestry And Agriculture, Stephen F. Austin State University

Weather Station Data

No abstract provided.

Water Quality Outreach And Education Strategies For Northwest Arkansas And Regional Watersheds, Katie Teague, John Pennington

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

Stakeholders impact water quality and have a responsibility to protect, maintain, and improve water quality throughout northwest Arkansas and watersheds everywhere. But unless the roles of responsibility and stewardship among all stakeholders is communicated clearly and repetitively, there will be little progress made towards maintaining and improving water quality, while lawsuits, blame, and inaction will persist. Thus, the overall goal of water quality education and outreach is to improve the ability of stakeholders to take care of their watershed by teaching them what actions are or are not beneficial for water quality protection, maintenance, or improvements. Specific outreach and education …

Water Quality And Watershed Conditions In The Upper Illinois River Watershed, Brian Haggard, Andrew Sharpley, Leslie Massey

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

The Illinois River and its tributaries have many uses that have been designated by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality including fisheries, aquatic life, primary contact waters, secondary contact waters, drinking water supply, and agricultural and industrial water supply, and water quality affects whether these uses can be supported. Since water quality can be quite complex, many types of measurements can be used as water quality indicators; some common water quality measurements include pH, dissolved oxygen concentration, and conductivity. More complicated measurements include determining nutrients, sediment and bacteria in the water, as well as assessing the aquatic life—aquatic insects, fish, …

Handbook Of Best Management Practices For The Upper Illinois River Watershed And Other Regional Watersheds, B.E. Haggard, Andrew Sharpley, Leslie Massey

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

Management actions are strategies carried out by stakeholders that are designed to implement water quality protection and restoration activities with a watershed. This publication presents a range of beneficial management actions from simple to complex that address the pollutant potential that is common across the watershed landscape of northwest Arkansas. Some management actions can be undertaken by any watershed stakeholder at any time, while others need to be carefully planned or lobbied to local and state government. The following chapters address potential management actions that can be taken by individuals or groups at households, businesses, institutions, municipalities, industrial facilities, farms, …

Final Report To The Illinois River Watershed Partnership: Recommended Watershed Based Strategy For The Upper Illinois River Watershed, Northwest Arkansas, B.E. Haggard, Andrew Sharpley, Leslie Massey, Katie Teague

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

This publication serves as the final report to the Illinois River Watershed Partnership (IRWP) regarding the project entitled “Development of the Watershed Management Plan for the Upper Illinois River”. This document was intended to provide this stakeholder based organization guidance in the development of a watershed management plan for the Illinois River drainage area (i.e., the Upper Illinois River Watershed, UIRW) in Arkansas. This document represents the final report from the Arkansas Water Resources Center (AWRC) and affiliated project investigators, and the IRWP may alter this document before the final submission of its watershed management plan to the Arkansas Natural …

A Vision For The Upper Illinois River Watershed, Kent Thornton

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

The Upper Illinois River Watershed is a special place where the threads of private, public and non‐profit partnerships are woven into the regional fabric of economic vitality; environmental stability, and social responsibility. Through its cultural heritage, the legacy of land stewardship, integrated with respect for personal property rights, continues. Natural resources are restored and sustained within a healthy mosaic of fields, forests, farms, woodlands, wetland prairies, pastures, cities, and naturally flowing streams. It is an incubator for green energy, entrepreneurial, educational and environmental initiatives.

Seamless Online Distribution Of Amundsen Multibeam Data, James Muggah, Ian Church, Jonathan Beaudoin, John E. Hughes Clarke

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

Since 2003, all underway multibeam and sub-bottom data from the Canadian Coast Guard Ship Amundsen has been posted online within approximately six months of the end of each cruise. A custom interface allowing the user to access 15' latitude by 30' longitude mapsheets was implemented in 2006, allowing the user to download the bathymetric and backscatter data at 10 metre resolution. While this interface matched the underlying data management scheme implemented at the University of New Brunswick, the zoom and pan capability was at a fixed scale with limited contextual data. In the past few years, with the introduction of …

Stable Isotopic And Geochemical Variability Within Shallow Groundwater Beneath A Hardwood Hammock And Surface Water In An Adjoining Slough (Everglades National Park, Fl), Lee J. Florea, Dorien K. Mcgee, Jonathan G. Wynn

Earth, Environmental, and Atmospheric Sciences Faculty Publications

Data from a ten-month monitoring study during 2007 in south Florida provide insight into the variation of δ18O, δD, and δ13C of DOC in surface water and shallow groundwater of the Everglades ecosystem. Bi-monthly samples were taken from surface water and time-averaged precipitation at Taylor Slough, and shallow groundwater from a well and a small cave within Palma Vista Hammock, an exposure of the Upper Pleistocene Miami Limestone.

δ18O and δD values in shallow groundwater from the well and cave remain near the mean of -2.4 ‰ and -12 ‰, respectively (VSMOW scale). 18O and D are enriched in surface …

Measurement And Interpolation Of Sea Surface Temperature And Salinity In The Tropical Pacific: A 9,000 Nautical Mile Research Odyssey, Amber Brooks

Earth and Soil Sciences

The purpose of this project was to compare spline and inverse distance weighting interpolation tools on data collected in the tropical Pacific Ocean by ship and data from a global network of CTD floats, known as Argo floats (fig.1), to provide evidence that technological advancement and integration is aiding our understanding of the ocean-atmosphere system of planet Earth. Thirty-one sea surface temperature and salinity samples were manually taken across a 9,000 nautical mile trek of the Pacific Ocean for the months of April, May and June 2008. Argo ASCII globally gridded monthly averaged sea surface temperature and salinity data, from …

Regulatory Drivers For The Upper Illinois River And Other Regional Watersheds, Ray Weida

Arkansas Water Resources Center Technical Reports

Environmental regulations are put in place to protect the air, water and land from threat of pollution. Regulatory programs establish pollution limits, determine compliance, and enforce environmental laws and regulations for waterbodies within the watershed based on the designated uses for the individual waterbody. These established regulations make sure that the state’s mandatory standards for clean water and the minimum federal standards are being achieved. Environmental regulations are established on both the federal and state levels. On the federal level, Congress has authorized the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other governmental agencies to create and enforce regulations. The EPA delegates …

A Comparison Of Copepoda (Order: Calanoida, Cyclopoida, Poecilostomatoida) Density In The Florida Current Off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Jessica L. Bostock

HCNSO Student Theses and Dissertations

Copepods, minute crustaceans, are vital constituents of marine food web dynamics in tropical ecosystems. Ecologically, copepods provide the link between primary production and tertiary consumers. Changes in population structure and densities may impact ecosystem stability and production on small to large spatial scales. The present study examined the influence of the Florida Current on copepod population densities off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida due to limited data in the area. Samples were collected during February and July 2007 at two locations, Stations A and B. Station A, dependent on current dynamics, fluctuated between the most western boundary and the …

Application Of Jpeg 2000 Wavelet Compression To Multibeam Echosounder Mid-Water Acoustic Refectivity Measurements, Jonathan Beaudoin

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

No abstract provided.

Hydrographic Products/Services As A Fundamental Component Of The E-Navigation Concept Of Operation, Lee Alexander, Robert Ward

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

e-Navigation is a recent initiative aimed at moving traditional maritime navigation towards a connected digital environment. Defined by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as “the harmonized collection, integration, exchange, presentation and analysis of maritime information onboard and ashore by electronic means to enhance birth-to-birth navigation and related services, for safety and security at sea and protection of the marine environment”, e-Navigation is not a new system of equipment but more an operational concept. Three significant outcomes are envisioned: 1) Shipboard navigation systems will benefit from the integration of own ship sensors, supporting information, standard user interface, and a comprehensive system …

New Approaches For Evaluating Lidar-Derived Shoreline, Christopher Parrish, Stephen A. White, Brian R. Calder, Shachak Pe'eri, Yuri Rzhanov

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

This study presents and compares two new methods of assessing the uncertainty of lidar-derived National Shoreline mapped by NOAA’s National Geodetic Survey: an empirical (ground-based) approach and a stochastic (Monte Carlo) approach. OCIS codes: (280.3640) Lidar; (120.2830) Height measurements; (000.4430) Numerical approximation and analysis

Recent Advances In The Climate Change Biology Literature: Describing The Whole Elephant, A. Townsend Peterson, Shaily Menon, Xingong Li

Peer Reviewed Publications

Climate change biology is seeing a wave of new contributions, which are reviewed herein. Contributions treat shifts in phenology and distribution, and both document past and forecast future effects. However, many of the current wave of contributions are observational and correlational, and few are experimental in nature, and too often a conceptual framework in which to contextualize the results is lacking. An additional gap is the lack of effective cross-linking among areas of research, for example, connection of sea-level rise and climate change implications for distributions of species, or evolutionary adaptation studies with distributional shift studies. Although numerous important contributions …

Modeling The Effect Of Oceanic Internal Waves On The Accuracy Of Multibeam Echosounders, Travis Hamilton, Jonathan Beaudoin

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

When ray bending corrections are applied to multibeam echosounder (MBES) data, it is assumed that the varying layers of sound speed lie along horizontally stratified planes. In many areas internal waves occur at the interface where the water’s density changes abruptly (a pycnocline), this density gradient is often associated with a strong gradient in sound speed (a velocline). The internal wave introduces uncertainty into the echo soundings through two mechanisms: (1) tilting of the velocline, and (2) vertical oscillation of the velocline’s depth. A model has been constructed in order to examine how these effects degrade the accuracy of MBES …

4d Multimodal Visualization And Analysis Of Seafloor Vents And Plumes, Maurice Doucet, Mark Paton, James V. Gardner, Jens Greinert

Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping

No abstract provided.

A Comparison Of Methods For Determining Significant Wave Heights-Applied To A 3-M Discus Buoy During Hurricane Katrina, Leslie C. Bender Iii, Norman Guinasso, John N. Walpert, Stephan D. Howden

Faculty Publications

In August 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed 90 km to the west of a 3-m discus buoy deployed in the Mississippi Sound and operated by the Central Gulf of Mexico Ocean Observing System (CenGOOS). The buoy motions were measured with a strapped-down, 6 degrees of freedom accelerometer, a three-axis magnetometer, and from the displacement of a GPS antenna measured by postprocessed-kinematic GPS. Recognizing that an accelerometer experiences a large offset due to gravity, the authors investigated four different means of computing wave heights. In the most widely used method for a buoy with a strapped-down, 1D accelerometer, wave …

Evaluation Of Data Reduction Algorithms For Real-Time Analysis, Steven M. Lazarus, Michael E. Splitt, Michael D. Lueken, Rahul Ramachandran, Xiang Li, Sunil Movva, Sara J. Graves, Bradley T. Zavodsky

Ocean Engineering and Marine Sciences Faculty Publications

Data reduction tools are developed and evaluated using a data analysis framework. Simple (nonadaptive) and intelligent (adaptive) thinning algorithms are applied to both synthetic and real data and the thinned datasets are ingested into an analysis system. The approach is motivated by the desire to better represent highimpact weather features (e.g., fronts, jets, cyclones, etc.) that are often poorly resolved in coarse-resolution forecast models and to efficiently generate a set of initial conditions that best describes the current state of the atmosphere. As a precursor to real-data applications, the algorithms are applied to one- and two-dimensional synthetic datasets. Information gleaned …