The Adaptive Ecosystem Climatology (AEC): Implementation

Ecological forecasting used in decision-making for conservation and resource management frequently relies upon climatologies, remote sensing observations, or models. Each of these elements has inherent limitations and errors. The Adaptive Ecosystem Climatology (AEC) is a flexible, on-line tool for ecoforecasting applications; it melds in-situ observations, satellite data, and output from a state-of-the-art, data assimilative, coupled bio-optical-physical ocean model system. AEC mitigates the shortcomings of these individual components and combines their strengths to enhance decision-making tools for conservation and natural resource management. The system is implemented on the NOAA Ocean NOMADS web portal. Visualization and analysis tools are available on this portal, climatologies can be displayed, and data files can be downloaded, for direct input into external management models (such as ecosystem, oil trajectory, or fisheries models) and other ecoforecasting applications.

Ocean properties available from the coupled model and satellite imagery include primary ecosystem components (temperature, salinity, sea surface height, currents, plankton, and chlorophyll). We have built a three-dimensional, dynamically balanced, gridded, static climatology for each calendar day, employing data for the period 1980-2012. Using the static climatology as a background ‘first guess’, recent observations (satellite or in situ) are assimilated to adjust the climatology toward current conditions, to provide updated, representative fields (adaptive climatology).

AEC can be used to examine mean conditions, to analyze available observations, or as input and boundary conditions to many types of models (conceptual, statistical, water-quality, biogeochemical, production, mass-balance energy flow models, individual-based, and multispecies models with explicit species interaction terms, sophisticated end-to-end models, etc.). We demonstrate the utility of AEC using an individual-based, multispecies model configured for high-trophic level groups of fish and invertebrate species on the West Florida Shelf.