CSS / NOAA

CSS under contract to NOAA*

Marine Spatial Scientist (Feb. 2018 - Present)

This position is located at the NOAA Beaufort Lab, Pivers Island, NC

Primary everyday tasks include:

Create spatial data sets
Create/run spatial siting models
Provide spatial science advice/expertise

Pivers Island, home to the NOAA Beaufort Lab and the Duke Marine Lab

Highlights:

Assisted numerous teams with spatial planning and spatial datasets for siting macroalgae as part of an ARPA-E research grant
Created datasets and rules used by the newly released OceanReports web based tool, for automating marine spatial planning
Worked with a number of large remote sensing and modeled oceanographic datasets, such as HYCOM, FVCOM, and SWAN

Creating Spatial Data

Create spatial data sets at local, regional, and global scales from remotely sensed and modeled data. Many high quality datasets are freely available from NASA, NOAA, and other sources. We download raw and pre-processed data to create climatologies, extract regions, reformat data, combine datasets for analysis, etc.

Some examples include:

Light intensity at depth using Beer-Lambert Law
Sea Surface Temperature extremes
Automatic Identification System Vessel tracks
Current Speed and Direction

Global Solar Insolation

Biweekly Max Sea Surface Temperature

Spatial Models and Aquaculture Siting

Using standard Marine Spatial Planning techniques, such as a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, we run suitability / siting analyses for a variety of marine aquaculture operations throughout the United States Economic Exclusion Zone.

Some example of siting projects:

Saccharina latissima suitability in the Northeast
Sciaenops ocellatus suitability in the Gulf of Mexico
Eucheuma isoforme suitability in the United States Caribbean and off the West Florida coast

Below is a brief overview of a suitability analysis:

1. Grid created

2. Conflicts examined

3. Relative suitability calculated

*I work for CSS, and I am under contract to the Coastal Aquaculture Siting and Sustainability (CASS) program, which is a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) - National Ocean Service (NOS) - National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) - Marine Spatial Ecology (MSE) Branch. NOTE: I was originally hired by JHT, another contracting company, to work as a spatial scientist for the CASS group in Feb. 2018. However, in June 2018 JHT lost the contract to CSS, as every 5 years the Federal government re-bids contracts. The projects and work remained the same, the only difference came on the human resource side of things.

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