RUCOOL welcomed NJDEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette, Megan Brunatti, and Bob Schuster to the COOLroom and Glider Lab yesterday.

Down at the Rutgers Class of 1914 Boathouse, students boarded canoes and kayaks, equipped with trash bags, gloves, and a passion for clean watersheds. The afternoon was spent paddling the river to collect trash in hard-to-access places. Some interesting finds included a gutter, tires, a lawn chair, a car battery, and much more! Thank you to all the students who left our local environment cleaner than they found it.

CODAR Ocean Sensors is pleased to announce it has been awarded a National Offshore Wind Research and Development Consortium (NOWRDC), Innovation in Offshore Wind grant titled “Oceanographic HF Radar Data Preservation in Wind Turbine Interference Mitigation”.  Led by Dale Trockel and Chad Whelan, the focus of this project will be twofold: 1) to use empirical machine learning methods, aided by the physics of wind turbine interference (WTI), to estimate WTI signals to a high degree of accuracy such that they can be separated and removed from the oceanographic echoes and 2) to use multiple HFR stations operating in multi-static mode to fill in gaps caused by WTI interference and WTI mitigation methods. CODAR, a member of CeNCOOS, will be partnering with SECOORA member ECU Coastal Studies Institute (Mike Muglia) and MARACOOS members Rutgers University (Hugh Roarty) and Old Dominion University (Teresa Updyke) to investigate these methods using the radar echoes from turbines in the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind (CVOW) project.  For more information, please contact Chad Whelan. To learn more about NOWRDC, visit their website: https://nationaloffshorewind.org/.

National Weather Service Wave Forecasting Rutgers and MARACOOS are working with NOAA Weather Forecasting Office (WFO) Philadelphia to develop wave measurements from High Frequency (HF) radar.  The HF radars traditionally provide surface current measurements that are utilized by NOAA and US Coast Guard.  Another measurement that is under development is wave height, period and direction.  Recently WFO Philadelphia utilized HF radar data to analyze the swell from Hurricane Larry and forecaster Nicholas Carr mentioned it in his rip current forecast discussion.  They also compared HF radar measurements with buoy observations in May 2021 (see below) and the HF radar retrievals compared favorably with the buoy observations.

Congratulations to Schuyler Nardelli for Winning the MTS Student Poster Competition. Original Article

Rutgers had to retire the High Frequency radar installation at Cape May Point, New Jersey this September.  The radar installation was hosted at the Saint Mary by-the-Sea Retreat House and is closing permanently on September 24, 2021.  Saint Mary by-the-Sea was a retreat house sponsored by the Congregation of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Philadelphia to provide opportunities for annual retreat for members of their Congregation. We would like to thank Sister Kathy Hart for serving as our point of contact for the duration of the deployment.  The radar was installed in 2007, thus bringing an end to this 14-year time series.  We will be pursuing nearby locations to relocate the radar equipment in the coming months.

The Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL) and Rutgers Cooperative Extension (RCE) issued the final report for the 2021 Partners in Science Workshop, which was hosted virtually on January 28, 2021. This workshop, Identifying Ecological Metrics and Sampling Strategies for Baseline Monitoring During Offshore Wind Development, included both a pre-workshop participant survey and “world café” format workshop discussions. The event was co-hosted by RUCOOL and RCE, sponsored by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, and moderated by the Consensus Building Institute. The survey and workshop aimed to gather community input to define the parameters required to quantify baseline ecological variability that will enable the evaluation of potential impacts from offshore wind development. The report details results from the pre-workshop survey, presentations from several workshop participants, and the multiple breakout sessions held during this half-day workshop. A summary of the main findings includes: The pace of offshore wind development is faster than the pace of fisheries science and it is critical that marine fisheries resources and fishing activity are considered during all phases of an offshore wind farm from pre-construction through operations and decommissioning. Baseline studies should begin at least 2-3 years prior to construction, with these efforts continuing via monitoring studies for at least 5 years post-construction, and less frequent sampling throughout the life of the wind farm. There was a clear consensus that any baseline and/or monitoring study should consider the entire system, from the dynamic oceanographic habitat up through the food web. There is a critical need for engaging the broader stakeholder community in developing techniques and survey design that would prevent disruption to existing survey methods once the wind farms are built; this could include instrumentation on the turbine platforms themselves, and/or new methods to fill any gaps within the wind farm areas. Studies should be designed and implemented through collaboration with all expert areas, including industry, academia, and state and federal government agencies; regional efforts should be made to coordinate, integrate, and consolidate existing and new data. The variability of the ocean makes it difficult to identify clear control areas for studies, particularly around physical and chemical variables; gradient design may be more appropriate. Ocean currents and other ocean variables related to the mixing of seasonal stratification (cold pool processes) are important and should be measured throughout the water column. Fisheries surveys should be hypothesis-driven, address gaps in existing research, and prioritize species within each study based on site-specific vulnerability. Spatial and temporal variability will impact fisheries vulnerability and risks, and the regional scope of development will require coordination in activities between sites. There should be a focus on monitoring specific marine mammals and other high conservation species; regional approaches for migratory species should cover night and day and inform knowledge gaps in species life stages. Use of and participation in community science sampling should be expanded. Cross-cutting each of these priorities was an emphasis placed on baseline and monitoring design that incorporated ecosystem approaches (described below) in a way that leveraged the power of partnerships. The full report can be found here.