Caro-COOPS for the North and South Carolina Coast
In 2002, ASG began collaborating with the University of South Carolina's Belle W. Baruch Institute to develop a new system to observe and understand coastal conditions as they develop. The system will help coastal managers understand and predict natural hazards, unusual water conditions, and threats such as storm surges and flooding from hurricanes.
The Carolinas Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction System (Caro-COOPS) is being designed using a combination of advanced, robust technologies. The system will include a web portal, providing data transmitted in real time from moorings and platforms along the Carolina coast.
Coastal managers will be able to store information across a multitude of variables, such as currents, waves, tides, temperature, and wind, over a long range of time and space. Researchers then can use Caro-COOPS to build models to visualize and understand different groupings of this complex information.
The system will benefit the environment and economy by helping to reduce the impacts of coastal and ocean hazards before they become major disasters.
The Caro-COOPS initiative is a joint partnership among USC, North Carolina State University, and the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The system will be the one of the first to include real-time monitoring and visualization of complex coastal data and will serve as a model for other such systems across the United States.
Three Parts of Caro-COOPS
- Observational Network – Includes a series of moorings and fixed platforms to gather data along the Carolina coast
- Data Management Infrastructure - Establishes a web interface for searching and retrieving data and metadata through an information hub
- Applications Subsystem - Allows a user to model data and to visualize information in a variety of methods, including three-dimensional graphs
It is anticipated that Caro-COOPS will be one of many sub-regional systems contributing to a Southeast Atlantic Coastal Ocean Observing System (SEA-COOS). SEA-COOS seeks to establish a regional system for coastal and ocean observation for North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.
USC Baruch Institute, an ASG Collaborator
The USC Baruch Institute, the lead institution for Caro-COOPS, is the principal academic coastal research center of South Carolina. The Institute has one of the world's most comprehensive and continuous sets of biological, chemical, and physical measurements for a coastal ecosystem. This more than twenty-year data set is invaluable in understanding long-term environmental changes, ecosystem stability, and environmental responses to human's increasing activities in the coastal zone.
Dr. Madilyn Fletcher, Director of the Baruch Institute, is the Principal Investigator (PI) of Caro-COOPS and has primary responsibility for overall project coordination, operation, and product generation. Her Co-PI is Dr. Dwayne Porter. Senior Personnel include ASG Director Dr. Joseph Johnson, and ASG experts in data management, systems administration, communications engineering, and web programming.
For more information on Caro-COOPS, please refer to the USC Baruch Institute website or www.carocoops.org.
