Blogs

Yesterday, I talked about the goals of the product factory, and made a few recommedations for how to use the CMOP product factory -- that is, what kind of products we should add to our repetoire.

Today, I want to set a roadmap for refactoring the factory itself -- What changes do we need to make to the design of the Factory based on feedback?

Observations about the Factory

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There were two keynote talks this morning: BJ Penn, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and Richard Spinrad, Assistant Administrator at NOAA.

Mr Penn spoke first, but I want to start with Dr. Spinrad. He spoke about the interoperability mandate for IOOS and GEOSS, but stressed that the design must be couched in the value to society -- which I interpret as emphasis on user-centered design.

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah, where I met with Claudio Silva, Juliana Freire, and their students.

There were concerns about traveling to the North Channel - rumor had it that the sand flats had shifted, making the channel inaccessible. Thankfully, these rumors were false. We sampled water six times during the day - three at ebb slack in the morning, and three at flood slack in the evening. We did not get freshwater samples, but surface salinity was 4.1 at the end of the ebb in the morning. Bottom salinities were high.

[img_assist|nid=776|title=Research technician Matt Kalisz preserving DNA samples|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=113|height=150] I forgot to post this one. Here are my notes from Aug 22.

[img_assist|nid=766|title=R/V Clifford Barnes|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=200|height=150] In the morning we traveled up to River Mile 23 to take freshwater samples near the end of the Ebb tide. We sampled a little down-estuary from our pre-selected site where the channel was a little wider and straighter. We then moved down-estuary to Tongue point at river mile 19, did a CTD cast, and continued to Buoy-39 at River mile 15 where we took our second set of samples. We continued down-estuary to river mile 8 off of the town of Hammond and collected a third set of samples.

[img_assist|nid=775|title=Chief Scientist Byron Crump blogging in the dry lab|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=200|height=150] We waited for sunrise before sampling at WB-50 and continuing along the Willipa Bay line going east. We visited nine stations, collecting water at four (WB-50, WB-35, WB-19, WB-9). We then transited to the estuary, crossing the bar at around 2200. We traveled up the estuary and anchored for the night near Tongue Point at river mile 19. Note that we had no cell phone or internet connectivity during our time on the Washington coast.

[img_assist|nid=774|title=Graduate student Caroline Fortunato collecting DNA & RNA samples|desc=|link=popup|align=right|width=200|height=150] We left the dock at 1200 and transited to station GH-3 on the Gray's Harbor line. Overnight we visited 10 stations for CTD casts and then traveled to station WB-50 on the Willipa Bay line to collect water samples on 25-Aug.

Antonio Baptista provided another set of plume way-points, but this set included CTD-only points between the water sampling points. Sites were adjusted to allow time to get to the dock in Astoria that evening. The captain estimated 3.5 hours to get from near the estuary mouth to the dock. We collected samples at five stations, 2 depths each for a total of 10 samples. We completed our final cast near the estuary mouth at 1610, motored into the estuary, and docked at Pier 2 in Astoria.

Feature Tracking exercises filled the day. We received 15 way-points in and around the Columbia River plume from Antonio Baptista, and visited these waypoints at specific times during the day for CTD casts. Stations were named P-1 to P-15. We e-mailed information about surface salinity and temperature from the CTD and the surface water flow through system back to the modeling team at OHSU, who used the information to compare with model predictions. The last cast was at 2100.