As part of the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), the oceanographic community is deploying a facility called the “Pioneer Array” tethered to the bottom of the ocean off the New England Coast. It is the first community relocatable process-oriented observatory, the equivalent of an international cyclotron for coastal ocean science. The array will enable a flotilla of measurement devices of different types to provide a rich data stream of physical and biological processes in the vicinity of the shelf-break front. This is a pilot project to put in place the multi-scale computational fluid dynamical modeling infrastructure required to make best use of the observations to be collected.

The pilot project will seed an ocean modeling collaboration that will exploit opportunities provided by the Pioneer Array for longer term research and educational activities in the MIT, UMass and WHOI communities and around the region. We are supporting two activities:

• a workshop aimed at fostering collaborations between observers, engineers, technologists and computational fluid dynamicists around the OOI Pioneer Array (held 4-5 June 2012 at UMass-Dartmouth) and
• a multi-scale ocean modeling pilot study designed to synthesize the observations and exploit the synthesis for science and engineering applications.