As far back as 2000, the Southeastern Universities' Research Association (SURA) Coastal Research Committee began to develop a vision for an open-access, distributed scientific laboratory. Now, Over seven years later, that vision is approaching reality. The SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program is a cornerstone of SURA's coastal research effort.

The SCOOP program involves several partner institutions working together to prototype an information technology-(IT) based infrastructure designed to enable a new way to do science. Building on SCOOP's demonstrated successes, SURA's Coastal Research Committee embraced the concept of creating a Distributed Coastal Laboratory (DCL) to support research and engineering studies on multi-faceted coastal processes, promote public education and outreach on the importance of coastal phenomena, and facilitate numerous practical applications. It is envisioned that the research conducted in connection with the DCL will extend well beyond SCOOP, to provide for open access to information on water quality, coastal and wetlands ecology, river hydrology, shelf and estuarine circulation while it continues to advance capabilities for predicting coastal inundation and coastal land loss.

SCOOP has achieved some remarkable inter-institutional collaborations and systems-integration accomplishments. But the existing system remains a proof of concept that must be developed into the DCL of the future. Several target mission objectives have been offered by researchers for a virtual coastal laboratory, including:

1. a test bed for the transition from research to operations;

2. a distributed, modular, standards-based, ensemble forecast system;

3. an advanced IT-based infrastructure adapted to enable better coastal science.

These goals provide the motivation for the transition from a SCOOP prototype to a reliable and sustainable DCL. The DCL has the potential to be a site where datasets, models, analysis tools and powerful computing resources could all be utilized by "virtual visiting" scientists. Visiting scientists would log in to utilize these resources, to perform their experiments (e.g., evaluate new wetting/drying algorithms), and them move on. While these concepts have been prototyped for inundation in SCOOP, they could be applied to coastal science in general. These are the functions of a "test bed" for advancing "community models," beyond standard practice.

Distributed computational resources such as SURAgrid and TeraGrid can contribute to the foundation of a DCL. Ideally, scientists utilizing the system would submit models for execution without concern for where these computations would occur, nor that the data providing forcings or boundary conditions, and the archived output would be distributed. The SCOOP prototype remains a research endeavor that will require substantial evolution before it can become a time-critical tool for practical applications, however, it is a viable prototype that can become an operational system leveraging the academic community. It can also engage private-sector and/or government partners to take on complementary operational responsibilities. Construction of the prototype is now in progress. The current challenge is to finish construction of the prototype and leverage the SCOOP infrastructure for one or more new science scenarios (e.g., circulation modeling, incorporation of hydrology into innundation, hypoxia), thereby making coastal scientists aware of how the system works and how they can use it to advance their science.