REP10- MSEAS Home Page

NURC REP10 Experiment - MSEAS Home Page

P.F.J. Lermusiaux, P.J. Haley, Jr.,
W.G. Leslie, O. Logutov

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Center for Ocean Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Exercise Background
Real-time Analyses and Forecast Pages
Simulation Estimates
REP-10 Links
Links to reports from other Projects

Exercise Background

Rationale
Predictability is inherently limited in highly dynamic ocean regimes such as coastal and shallow waters, straits, canyons, etc. Uncertainties can remain high because of our yet limited understanding of underlying processes in what appears to be a chaotic environment at short spatio-temporal scales. The lack of integration in observational networks and the monitoring difficulties in these areas may strongly compromise the characterization and prediction of the environment and the objective assessment of operational effectiveness and associated risk. Traditional ship-based experiments become difficult with rising fuel cost and call for innovative and adaptive techniques for persistent autonomous monitoring of the ocean to fill-in areas of high uncertainties.

Objectives
The scientific objective of the environmental program at NURC is to develop an environmental knowledge management system in the following approach:

develop robust monitoring and prediction techniques to rapidly characterize the environment in areas where knowledge is limited and uncertainties are high, with a particular focus on autonomous platforms (AUV, gliders/UUV) and remote sensing (passive and active, satellite, airborne-, land- and ship-based techniques):
- understand uncertainties in remote sensing and ground truth observations
- develop UUV adaptive sampling techniques
- develop air-sea-wave 2-way coupling methods
develop robust techniques to assess how environmental uncertainties affect the operational effectiveness and the associated risk and how observational and prediction errors are propagated to the end-user decision level:
- develop techniques for a decision support system for autonomous platforms
- develop tactical super-ensemble prediction techniques
- understand how environmental uncertainties affect operational effectiveness

The aim of the experiment will be to demonstrate and validate these techniques on a range of environmental processes and spatio-temporal scales relevant in an operational context. The Alboran Sea has been identified as a candidate area for the experiment, offering a challenging environment and a range of contrasted scientific and logistic (e.g. strong currents and heavy maritime traffic in some areas, medium or low currents and quite traffic in other areas) possibilities.

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