CLEANER: Collaborative Research: Concept Development Toward a Collaborative Large-Scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research with Focus on the Chesapeake Bay

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0414372 Ball It is proposed to create a cyberinfrastructured Environmental Field Facility (EFF), focusing on the Phoenix metropolis and its regional environs as a potential node of the Engineering Analysis Network of the NSF's CLEANER initiative. This EFF, called MEASURES (Multi-scale Environmental Analysis in Urban and Regional Ecosystems), will emphasize scientific, engineering and socio-economic issues related to the flow of air and water as well as transport and dispersion of flow-borne contaminants over a range of spatio-temporal scales. Intense observations that employ cutting-edge sensor and communications technologies, detailed theoretical analyses and laboratory experiments, high-performance computational simulations, sophisticated predictive modeling and sensor-model fusion are the key approaches to be employed. The data and new findings will be disseminated rapidly in suitable formats: to public officials in support of the policy/decision making and planning, to resource managers for adaptive management, to the general public for triggering an informed discourse, and to the researchers for scientific discovery and knowledge creation. In this planning proposal, a"proof-of-concept."project is proposed as an antecedent to MEASURES. It involves extensive monitoring of air flow patterns of multiple space-time scales, movement of contaminant plumes from point sources and deposition thereof in the regional domain circa urban Phoenix, Arizona. Particular attention will be paid to total Mercury (Hg) associated with regional power plant emissions, considering that certain lakes in eastern Arizona are contaminated by this neurotoxin; this appears to be a regional counterpart of a serious global problem that is largely attributed to aerial transport/deposition and runoff.