While sitting at her scientific workstation at the Western Regional Environmental Center, a biological oceanographer wants to explore the possibility that observations from an ongoing cruise in Alaska's Shelikof Strait support the hypothesis that a recent El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) event may be influencing a major pollock fish recruitment off Kodiak Island. During the last three months, data from satellite-linked moored subsurface ocean sensors, polar-orbiting satellites, numerical forecasting models, and coastal sampling stations have indicated that warm tropical water has progressively moved northward along the U. S. and Canadian Pacific coast. Now, real-time data from satellite-linked drifting buoys and current meter arrays, as well as ship surveys of fish egg and larvae show that a major circulation anomaly is occurring in the spawning region off Shelikof Strait. What looked like a high pollock catch year seems to be turning into an economic bust!
Using a mouse, she clicks a satellite icon that downloads the most recent 24-hour set of visible and infrared imagery from NOAA and NASA ocean-observing satellites. After clicking another icon, a new window opens that allows her to extract and compile a time series of the last 30 days of infrared imagery from the NASA satellite database in Pasadena, CA and the NOAA satellite database in Suitland, MD. Using tools available on the NII, she is able to integrate these heterogeneous data sets and to create an animation that clearly shows the progression of warm tropical waters toward the Alaskan coastal region that serves as a safe nursery for pollock larvae. With another icon selection, she overlays several tracks of drifting buoy data and subsurface moored current meter data onto the satellite imagery. These data suggest that the planned cruise track to study the new circulation feature will have to be modified to properly sample the feature. To plan for a new cruise track, she checks the on-line National Weather Service five-day weather forecast and the Navy's Pacific Ocean Circulation Model forecast for the study region.
In order to put this environmental event into perspective, she queries the National Oceanographic Data Center ship observations data base in Washington, DC for the past 50 years of sea surface temperature data. Using a graphical user interface available on the NII that lets scientists intuitively explore and visualize a variety of multi-dimensional data products, she zooms in on the North Pacific and quickly creates a 50-year animation loop of sea surface temperature. In another window of her workstation, she accesses the ENSO and Equatorial Undercurrent oceanographic database at the University of Washington. She creates a new graphical overlay of her data that suggests a long-term, phased relationship between equatorial processes and sea surface temperature in the northern Pacific. She confirms this visual observation by running correlation and coherence analyses using a point-and-click time series package, available on the network, from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.