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ICON/CREWS
Process
 The
ICON/CREWS program, as a part of NOAA's Coral Health And
Monitoring Programs (CHAMP), is designed to collect real time
environmental data from prime coral reef sites throughout the world,
analyze patterns and trends via expert systems (an artificial intelligence
technology) and predict the effects of environmental events on coral reefs
such as bleaching, fish and invertebrate spawning and migration. CIMAS
researchers working in association with the ICON project at the Atlantic
Oceanographic Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) provide expertise to the
ICON/CREWS knowledge engineer in the configuring of expert systems which have
been designed to analyze the influence of tens of thousands of
permutations of meteorological and oceanographic parameters on the reef
environments. The data are collected at remote stations located in coral
reef areas such as St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands and Lee Stocking Island,
Bahamas. These on-site stations record environmental data encompassing
but not limited to atmospheric and sea temperatures, wind speeds and
direction, ultraviolet radiation at the surface and 1 meter depth, tides,
salinity, and barometric pressure. These data are relayed in near
real-time hourly intervals via a GOES satellite transmission and received
in encoded format by NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and
Information Service (NESDIS). NESDIS makes the recent data available
through the Internet. An automated range checking at AOML validates the
received data and formats it for insertion into the long-term database.
The ICON Integrated Monitoring Network Application (IMN) provides the
architecture to receive data from multiple sources concurrently, at the
same time servicing query requests from Internet users and automated
computer programs that use the data to produce information synthesis
products (“alerts”) based on the knowledge gleaned from domain experts.
The end users
(e.g., researchers, marine sanctuary managers, and the public) receive
high quality, reliable data on demand, advancing the understanding of
coral reefs and their environments.
Prepared by
Louis Florit
University of Miami, CIMAS
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