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Delaware Environmental Observing System: An Update
David R. Legates, University of Delaware, Newark, DE; and D. J. Leathers, T. DeLiberty, G. E. Quelch, and K. Brinson
The Delaware Environmental Observing System (DEOS) is a real-time system dedi¬cated to monitoring environmental conditions across the State of Delaware, the near-shore coastal waters and the Delaware Bay, and adjacent regions in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey. Although DEOS is designed, in part, to be a source for real-time and archived environmental data, it specifically serves as a tool for decision makers involved in emergency management, natural resource monitoring, agriculture, transportation, and other activities throughout the State of Delaware and the Delmarva Peninsula. It is a cooperative venture supported by a number of state and federal agencies and many of its visualization and analysis tools are designed to be adaptable outside Delmarva. Although DEOS has been in existence for more than three years, we recently secured long-term support that will keep us accomplishing our mission.
Our data ‘warehouse', the DEOS Environmental Monitoring and Observing Network (DEMON), combines data from several environmental networks which are stored in an Oracle database. These networks include weather stations installed and maintained by DEOS as well as USGS and DGS stream and tide gage data, ocean and near-shore buoy data from NOAA's National Data Buoy Center, and weather station networks from a number of other high-quality data networks around the Delmarva Peninsula. DEOS has installed fourteen weather stations around the region and there are plans to install five to seven more stations along the Delaware Coast and in Chester County, PA in the next year. Weather data are received every five minutes from most data networks and stream and tide data are received with a fifteen-minute resolution. Observations include both meteorological (e.g., air temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, precipitation, soil moisture and temperature, solar radiation, and wind vector) and hydrological variables (e.g., streamflow, tidal heights, wave height and period). Information on air and water quality as well as well levels will be incorporated soon. A significant effort is currently directed toward providing quality control and assurance (QA/QC) and preventive maintenance.
The DEOS Integrated Visualization and Analysis System (DIVAS) will integrate these surface observations with NWS WSR-88D radar precipitation estimates using ESRI's ArcGIS 9 Server and provide real-time calibration. DIVAS will generate estimates of meteorological and environmental variables over a high spatial resolution grid which can be input to a variety of agricultural or other numerical models or viewed over the Internet. Both Kentucky and Virginia are currently using the prototype DIVAS system to monitor drought and other environmental conditions across their respective states. DEOS Analysis Systems (DAS) will provide easy access to the data stored in the Oracle database, allowing informed decision making for a variety of environmentally sensitive applications. For example, during the passage of tropical storms, nor'easters, or heavy snowfall, DEOS provides up-to-date information on developing weather events. DEOS data also are used to assist with developing emergency management situations (such as toxic spills, hazardous chemical releases, and flash flooding events), to provide information for pesticide management and mosquito control, to schedule controlled burns of invasive plant species along the coast, to assist with refuse disposal activities, and with research projects to assist with evapotranspiration modeling.
This poster will present the current state of our system, including innovations and updates that have occurred since we presented at the AMS meeting two years ago. DEOS has now received permanent state funding and we have a number of new developments to present.
Poster Session 1, Poster Session I
Monday, 15 January 2007, 2:30 PM-4:00 PM, Exhibit Hall C
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