Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps

The eMOLT project is a non-profit collaboration of industry, science, and academics devoted to monitoring of the physical environment of the Gulf of Maine and the Southern New England shelf. In a series of phases funded by the Northeast Consortium (2001-2008), low-cost strategies have been developed to monitor the environment. While the primary variable is bottom temperature, salinity and current velocity have been measured as well with the help of nearly 100 lobstermen dispersed along the entire New England coast. We hope to extend our existing multi-year time series (as well as our monitoring capabilities), continue integration with the Northeast Regional Association for Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS), and contribute to whatever operational systems are developed for our region in the future.

We expect the primary users of eMOLT data, aside from the lobstermen themselves, will be local ocean circulation modelers. The need for data in initialization, assimilation, and validation of their numerical simulations is becoming more and more obvious. The complex time-varying nature of the Gulf of Maine system calls for incorporating as much data as possible in order to generate realistic flow fields. We hope to supplement the data supplied by NERACOOS by providing modelers with a extensive array of bottom observations as well as Lagrangian drifter tracks. Our hope is that these numerical models will someday help in our understanding of lobster larvae drift and the fate of any particles for that matter, such as Harmful Algal Blooms, along our coast. What are the mechanisms that govern the both the short-term and long-term variability of the GoM ecosystem and can we generate realistic, time-varying, 3-d simulations of these changes?