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PROJECT SUMMARY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIRTUAL BEACH MODEL, PHASE I: AN EMPIRICAL MODEL
Citation:
FRICK, W. E. AND Z. GE. PROJECT SUMMARY: DEVELOPMENT OF THE VIRTUAL BEACH MODEL, PHASE I: AN EMPIRICAL MODEL. Presented at NOAA's Oceans and Human Health Initiative All PI's 2006 Annual Meeting, Charleston, SC, January 18 - 20, 2006.
Impact/Purpose:
A main objective of this task is to combine empirical and physical mechanisms in a model, known as Visual Beach, that
- is user-friendly
- includes point and non-point sources of contamination
- includes the latest bacterial decay mechanisms
- incorporates real-time and web-based ambient and atmospheric and aquatic conditions
- and has a predictive capability of up to three days to help avert potential beach closures.
Description:
Mathematical models based on water-quality and other environmental surrogates may help to provide water quality assessment within a few hours and potentially provide one to three day forecasts, providing beach managers and public-health officials a tool for developing beach-specific predictive models for their own beaches, with the goal of making beaches swimmable as much as possible. The USEPA, Office of Research Development, is working on developing such as tool called "Virtual Beach." Because considerable experience in developing predictive statistical models is required, the USEPA is collaborating with USGS (Columbus) to incorporate their experience and modeling procedures and approaches into Virtual Beach. This paper is a project summary of work accomplished so far.