Ongoing Projects

1. Marine Environmental Prediction System

This first major CMEP initiative is a $3.6 million infrastructure project funded by the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and the Canada/Nova Scotia Cooperative Agreement. Significant contributions and support also came from Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction, Satlantic, SUN/OSS, IBM, SonTek, Highliner Fine Foods and the Town of Lunenburg.

The Marine Environmental Prediction System (MEPS) consists of three components:

• Relocatable instrument systems deployed in the field;

• Communication systems that bring observations from many sources to an analysis centre in real-time; and

• Modeling, analysis and software systems to transform the observations into visualizations and predictions accessible to a broad range of users.

MEPS will be deployed in three environments:

• Lunenburg Bay, a coastal inlet, where a coupled model will assimilate data from three instrumented moorings, tide gauges, and meteorological instrumentation;

• On the continental shelf (Charlottetown Storm Surge Prediction System), where some instrumentation will be installed and a working model will be upgraded; and

• Across an ocean basin (North Atlantic Basin Seasonal Nowcast System), for which modeling infrastructure will be substantially improved.