Robert Weisberg, physical oceanographer, storm surge expert and professor at the University of South Florida’s College of Marine Science, is serving on the “Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects,” a national group formed by The National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council. The committee, comprised of 14 members, has been charged with the responsibility of reviewing data, analyses and conclusions reached by the Interagency Performance Evaluation Task Force (IPET) with regard to Hurricane Katrina’s devastating blows to the storm protection systems in New Orleans. The committee, also charged with offering recommendations to the IPET initiative, recently released its first report, with two reports to follow by their reporting deadline in June, 2006.

“While the IPET is comprised of excellent scientists and engineers from both the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and academia, and it is also being advised by a separate group formed by the American Society of Civil Engineers,” said Weisberg. “There is a need for a fully independent review team without preconception or allegiance, a role filled by the NRC panel.”

The committee’s report offers recommendations in three key areas: system-wide issues, geotechnical data and investigations, and hydrology and hurricane surge and wave analysis. It calls first upon IPET to evaluate levee breach sites and vulnerabilities in future storm events and advocates greater use of geographic information system (GIS) mapping techniques to gather data. Second, the report cites the need for an analysis of soil conditions along the levees to better understand soil properties when challenged by storm waters. Finally, the report speaks on the importance of applying accurate models to assess the Katrina storm surge and wave effects and to predict what the vulnerability of New Orleans may be for future storms.

Weisberg’s role on the panel is primarily aimed at issues related to hurricane storm surge.

The committee’s report notes that IPET has been “asked to perform several complicated, time-consuming and data-intensive tasks on a short time line” but makes recommendations for IPET and, as another hurricane season approaches, seeks to answer vital questions, such as: “What is the risk to New Orleans and vicinity from future storms? Did the exiting protection system fail because of poor construction or maintenance? Did it fail because design criteria were exceeded? Was the failure the result of a combination of these factors? What is the authorized level of protection?”

“Since the design of the hurricane protection system for New Orleans - or for any other threatened area - must begin with realistic levels of surge and waves from which protection is sought, it is important that the review process takes this into account,” explained Weisberg. “In other words, while the existing hurricane protection system in New Orleans was based on certain criteria, we need to ask if these criteria are adequate for the future. It’s one of the areas I am most concerned about.”

-Report courtesy of Randolph Fillmore

“ This is the eighth year for this event,” said John Ogden, FIO director. “This year's event has special significance because of the release of the report of the Florida Oceans and Coastal Resource Council to the Florida legislature identifying research priorities for managing Florida 's oceans and coastal areas.”

The Florida Oceans and Coastal Resource Council, established by House Bill 1855 in the last legislative session, has developed priorities for ocean and coastal research and established a statewide ocean research plan now posted to www.dep.state.fl.us/oceanscouncil/ . The plan outlines the research priorities recommended to Governor Jeb Bush in February, 2006.

Historically, Oceans Day has been a day for impressing lawmakers with the importance of preserving the natural integrity of the oceans and taking positive steps to repair what has imperiled them, especially the harm done by neglect and abuse at the hands of humankind. The CMS delegation to Tallahassee will emphasize that action needs to be taken to alleviate the plight of the oceans. They will seek better integration of science and policy and emphasize the potential win-win results in terms of the Florida economy by doing so.

“As students and professionals in marine science, we are excited to have the opportunity to speak with legislators about the issues facing our oceans,” said Remy Luerssen, a research scientist in the Institute for Marine Remote Sensing at the CMS. “We will speak to legislators on issues of habitat loss, pollution, climate change and funding for research and environmental education.”

FIO will sponsor exhibits in the Capitol courtyard and rotunda Apr. 19 from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and offer a special salute to the newly constituted Florida Oceans and Coastal Resource Council's 2006 research plan. Two friends of the oceans, “Officer Snook” and “Phin Dolphin,” pictured in the attachment, will help highlight the need for better marine resource management.

>-Report courtesy of Randolph Fillmore

"It’s happened before", said co- Weisberg and Virmani, who co-authored a paper recently published in Geophysical Research Letters (Vol.33 No.5) examining the 2005 hurricane season.

“The 2004 and early 2005 hurricane seasons were connected,” said Weisberg, a physical oceanographer who also serves on the Committee on New Orleans Regional Hurricane Protection Projects established by the National Academy of Engineering and the National Research Council.

“The unusually warm SSTs that developed in the Atlantic Ocean in the fall of 2004 did not decrease as much as usual in winter, so SSTs were higher than normal in the spring of 2005.”

According to Virmani and Weisberg, a hurricane season tends to lower SSTs, but the unusual condition in 2004 favored earlier developing and more intense hurricanes for 2005.

“Unusually warm SSTs have occurred before, and rather recently, giving us very active hurricane seasons in 1958, 1969, 1980, 1995 and 1998,” explained Virmani.

What accounted for the cataclysmic 2005 hurricane season?

According to Weisberg and Virmani, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), a large-scale temperature cycle in the north Atlantic, and an increasing temperature trend by global warming, may have been co-factors. However, these factors alone were not the sole contributors.

“Hurricane frequency is generally greater when the AMO is in its positive stage,” said Weisberg. “Over the last 120 years, the AMO has fluctuated, but has been in a positive phase since the mid-1990s. When a positive phase AMO combines with abnormally high SSTs, a record season results.”

How did the 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons compare with past seasons?

“The 2004 and 2005 hurricane seasons were not unique over the last 50 years,” explained Weisberg. “Nine of the last 11 hurricane seasons show above average activity, but it is interesting to note that less than two percent of intense hurricanes occur in June and July. Last year we had two major hurricanes before August.”

The most unusual aspect of the 2004-2005 seasons, concluded Weisberg and Virami, were the unusually high SSTs.

“Hurricanes and the subsequent winter months usually adjust SSTs back toward normal. That just didn’t happen after the 2004 season,” Weisberg said.

“Sound production by black drum serves as proxy for spawning,” said marine biologist Jim Locascio. “We want to see if it is possible to find out how much sound production from the black drum equals how much egg production .”

Locascio teamed with chemist and environmental scientist Eric Steimle, who developed a radio-controlled guided surface vehicle (GSV). For the deployment, Steimle’s GSV carried a DIDSON imagining sonar and a hydrophone listening device to eavesdrop on the spawning sounds of black drum. To compliment data collected by the DIDSON, USF Center for Ocean Technology engineer Bill Flanery contributed SIPPER, an imaging sensor mounted underneath the GSV. SIPPER was installed to digitally image and count small particles in the water - from seaweed to plankton - as the GSV -criss-crossed the football field-sized canal area. They hoped that SIPPER would discover clusters of newly fertilized fish eggs in the singing locations.

“The DIDSON creates images from sound and provides near video-like quality,” explained Locascio. “We used DIDSON as a high resolution fish finder to image the spawning fish and then have SIPPER image and count the eggs being produced.”

Their previous research used only hydrophones to locate the sound producing fishes, but this research attempted to image the adults and newly spawned eggs, giving a comprehensive look into the activity and production of the spawning population.

To test the unique system, the team traveled in mid-March to black drum spawning grounds in the canal system of Cape Coral, Florida, near Charlotte Harbor. The canal system is in the back yards of residential areas where Locascio and colleagues in 2005 were called in by residents to help explain odd noises from the canal, sounds so loud and spooky that residents were left unnerved. CMS researchers subsequently identified the sound as black drum males crooning love songs during spawning. The canal system is not far from an area near where CMS researchers recorded fish raising a chorus when Hurricane Charley rolled over the same waters in 2004.

“All systems operated well and we’re analyzing the data,” reported Locascio after the test.

Locascio and plankton biologist Andrew Remsen, who are analyzing the images collected by SIPPER, want to determine if the sounds picked up by the hydrophones are concurrent with the number of eggs seen in the SIPPER images. To do so, they are looking at tens of thousands of digital pictures that are cross-referenced to exact locations in the area that SIPPER and DIDSON, riding under the GSV, surveyed together in real-time.

SIPPER can image and identify objects down to 1/4 of a millimeter and image subjects as small as a human hair while viewing 15 liters of water every second.

According to Flanery, an early concern was that riding just beneath the surface SIPPER would be imaging a lot of bubbles and that it might not be able to easily tell the difference between bubbles and fish eggs.

“We were pleasantly surprised to find that the images were easily distinguishable because SIPPER’s recognition software was able to sort the images,” said Flanery.

This was the first field assignment for SIPPER and DIDSON to jointly ride as GSV passengers and explore the relationship between male fish spawning sounds and the discovery of newly fertilized eggs. It was also the first deployment of the third version of SIPPER, SIPPER3.

“Eric’s vehicle never carried so much weight at one time, but it performed magnificently,” said Locascio. “SIPPER also set new achievement levels.”

Spawning season in the area is drawing to a close, so the research team is checking their data a fine-tuning the equipment for bigger experiments when the encore begins.

“Each season will have crescendos, peaking in August and capped with a wild September,” he predicted. “I just hope that next year we will not be wrapping Christmas presents at the same time we are putting up the hurricane shutters.”

Willoughby, who worked at NOAA from 1975 to 2002 and made over 400 reconnaissance flights into the eyes of hurricanes and typhoons, noted that the spate of destructive storms in the 21st century is not as curious as the lack of them from 1970 to 2003. He added that during what he called a serious hurricane “respite” coastal development and populations grew considerably, adding to the threat to life and property.

“That respite was unprecedented,” said Willoughby, mapping out 27 catastrophic hurricanes in 106 seasons from 1896 to 2002. He defined as ‘catastrophic' a storm causing more than 100 deaths and costing over nine billion dollars in damage.

He noted that hurricane seasons seemed to put different geographical areas in the cross hairs, that hurricanes were bad for the Carolinas in the 1990s and bad for the Gulf Coast in 2004-2005.

“But it might all come down to good luck and bad luck” he suggested. “However, landfall points tend to clump.”

When cost-adjusted for inflation, the damage of hurricanes in the early 20th century, such as the 1928 Miami hurricane, he said that the average cost of serious hurricanes was constant - at about $5 billion annually. Loss of life has gone down, however, with Hurricane Katrina the recent exception.

“In 2005, the nightmare scenario came to pass,” he concluded. “When Hurricane Katrina was identified as a category 3 hurricane, many people on the Mississippi coast who had survived Camille, a category 5, thought they could weather Katrina. But it was the massive storm surge that made the difference. Perhaps we need a way to categorize surge. Surge can not be equated with storm category.”

He compared Katrina to the 1928 hurricane that caused Lake Okeechobee to breach its levies. Subsequent flooding killed many hundreds, most of whom he described as ‘economically disadvantaged.' Loss of life with Katrina was the greatest in the U.S. since the 1928 Miami hurricane, he added.

Does global warming have an effect on hurricane formation or intensity?

Willoughby generally dismissed global warming as a cause for the increase in recent big hurricanes, suggesting that a lack of shear (a high-altitude change in wind speed or direction) in the atmosphere over the Gulf of Mexico and the hurricanes' interaction with the “loop current” in the Gulf were largely responsible for the spate of recent destructive storms and directing them toward their targets.

“Shear is poison to hurricanes,” said Willoughby, adding that the loop current guided the storms toward populated areas on the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts during the 2005 hurricane season. “Global warming may have some effect, but it's not the main thing happening.”

Willoughby's lecture was the concluding lecture in the 2006 event. Other lecturers included Simon Jennings, Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture, Suffolk, UK, Harry Roberts of the Coastal Studies Institute and Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences, Louisiana State University and Thomas Bianchi of the Department of Oceanography, Texas A&M University.

“Several mass strandings of beaked whales have been correlated with military exercises involving mid-frequency sonar, yet there are unknowns about their hearing sensitivities,” said Cook. “Because it has been hypothesized that some strandings are sonar-induced, our study measured hearing abilities of a beaked whale by measuring auditory evoked potentials (AEP), used commonly to measure hearing in human infants, birds, fish and other animals. We wanted to see if they had particular auditory sensitivity to mid-range sonar in wide use by the U.S. Navy and others.”

In July, 2004, when a young male beaked whale in poor health stranded near St. Lucie Inlet on the east coast of Florida, it came under the care of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. The event afforded marine biologist Cook and colleagues to test its hearing by measuring its response to auditory signals of varying frequencies.

“A live stranding of a beaked whale is a relatively rare event, and this was an opportunity to learn about the hearing abilities of this little-known group of whales,” explained Cook. “We found that the hearing of beaked whales was similar to other echolocating dolphins and whales.”

According to Cook, beaked whales are capable of detecting sounds between five and 80 kHz, which is in the range of frequencies used for echolocation. The highest frequency humans can hear is 20 kHz. The U.S. Navy’s mid-frequency tactical sonars operate between 2.6 and 8.2 kHz.

“Our measurements did not support the hypothesis that beaked whales have a particularly high auditory sensitivity at the frequencies used in mid-range sonar,” concluded Cook. “However, these data are important for understanding the range over which beaked whales can detect mid-frequency sonar.”

Marine technology company CodaOctopus of New York and the Center for Ocean Technology at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg think they may have a solution. Backed with funding from the Navy, the USF center has developed a "mobile inspection package" using technology developed by CodaOctopus to assist in identifying potential hazards that are difficult to see via conventional underwater cameras.

The package includes a GPS-aided navigational system and a three-dimensional sonar device called the Echoscope the company says can be used to see in murky, zero-visibility waters.

CodaOctopus strategic development executive Angus Lugsdin says the Echoscope can be mounted on a pole attached to a boat or on a remotely operated underwater robot. The product is being evaluated for use by the Navy and the Coast Guard, he said, adding that the mobile inspection package developed by USF is expected to be commercially available in about six months.

Dr. Daniel Yeh

“Those contaminants can be dug up, but dredging might make matters worse by spreading the sediment contaminated,” he said. “Contaminants may linger for decades and pose a threat to the biota and the food chain – so what do we do with them?”

Yeh, who also researches methods for producing clean water through inexpensive filtration processes, suggested three methods for dealing with contaminated sediments – dredging followed by confining, treatment and disposal, capping with a barrier layer to minimize risk, and accelerated natural attenuation by using microbes to break down the contaminants chemically. Each method, he noted, has pluses and minuses.

Yeh focused on hexachlorobenzene (HCB) and ways to speed up natural attenuation in sediments contaminated with HCB by adding food-grade “surfactants” – surface active agents – to enhance the solubility of HCB to improve their availability to microbes that can degrade them. Citing his doctoral research on a site near Lake Charles, Louisiana, Yeh described a biochemical de-chlorination pathway though which anaerobic microorganisms biotransform and reduce the toxicity of HCB.

He described a process of altering dredged material by drying and milling it and then adding surfactants. Tests demonstrated that the surfactants speeded up the process of contaminant removal from the dried, milled material.

Yeh suggested that the drying and milling process fractured the particles in the sediment, leaving them more vulnerable to the surfactant for clean up.

He concluded his talk by reviewing the feasibility of establishing treatment facilities that could treat contaminated marine sediments.

Marine technology company CodaOctopus of New York and the Center for Ocean Technology at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg think they may have a solution. Backed with funding from the Navy, the USF center has developed a "mobile inspection package" using technology developed by CodaOctopus to assist in identifying potential hazards that are difficult to see via conventional underwater cameras.

The package includes a GPS-aided navigational system and a three-dimensional sonar device called the Echoscope the company says can be used to see in murky, zero-visibility waters.

CodaOctopus strategic development executive Angus Lugsdin says the Echoscope can be mounted on a pole attached to a boat or on a remotely operated underwater robot. The product is being evaluated for use by the Navy and the Coast Guard, he said, adding that the mobile inspection package developed by USF is expected to be commercially available in about six months.