As the saying goes, history may not repeat itself, but it regularly rhymes. With this in mind, researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have teamed up with their colleagues to analyze historical environmental data to develop an ecological forecast of several indicators of Chesapeake Bay health.
While ecological forecasts are not new to Chesapeake Bay – the UMCES Integration and Application Network and EcoCheck have produced one for several years – scientists are always looking for new methodologies and data sources to improve the accuracy of their forecasts.
For the 2010 anoxia forecast, the research team formed a new partnership with scientists from Johns Hopkins University, Old Dominion University, the UMCES Horn Point Laboratory and the Chesapeake Bay Program to develop new forecasting techniques that take into account additional factors such as the prevalence of summer winds.
In addition to incorporating new variables into their models, scientists will also issue “rolling” forecasts throughout the summer to account for subtle environmental changes. Dissolved oxygen forecasts will be issued in early and late summer. In the team’s early summer anoxia forecast, the scientists are calling for a relatively small anoxia volume, when compared to conditions observed over the past 25 years. While any “dead zone” is bad for Bay inhabitants, this year’s early summer volume could rank as the fifth smallest since 1985.
