For Folks Who Fish, Swim, Boat, Follow the Weather or just Enjoy the Water, www.mymobilebay.com is Here!

The first long-term water quality/meteorological network has been established in Mobile Bay - www.mymobilebay.com. In an unprecedented collaboration of effort, a variety of agencies have pooled their resources to establish this long-needed continuous (24/7) monitoring capability.  Not only will the public be able to obtain hydrographic and meteorological data on Mobile Bay, they'll also be able to access information on rip currents, tides, beach monitoring and much more.

Over the past three years, the DISL and the Mobile Bay National Estuary program (MBNEP) refurbished and added hydrographic instrumentation to the long-existing Dauphin Island weather site; increased the capability of the site at the Weeks Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve; and just last year, established a station at the north end of the Bay at Meaher Park.  These actions were accomplished using funds from the Coastal Impact Assistance program and the MBNEP.

Alone, these three sites provide a north-south examination of Bay hydrography.  But it is with the addition of the 3-dimensional station at Middle Bay Light that the system has become truly valuable to both the technical community and the general public. The Lighthouse Association has provided access to the facility, while the Oyster Program at the University of South Alabama purchased the instrumentation necessary to provide a vertical assessment of the water column near the center of the Bay. The salinity distribution throughout the Bay is a key factor in the success of the oyster population.

The Coastal Program of the Lands Division of ADCNR provided funding to the Sea Lab for initial construction and maintenance of the site for the first year. The Coastal Program is committed to assisting the State in meeting its obligations under the coastal non-point source pollution program and impacts within the Bay are major management concerns.

This aquatic network is complemented by researchers at the Coastal Weather Research Center at the University of South Alabama (USA) who have received grants from National Science Foundation (NSF) and Senator Richard Shelby to install meteorological observation sites in the Mobile Bay area.

Hurricanes form an important application that has attracted a lot of attention in recent months. The NEP monitoring sites include meteorological as well as marine components. This makes these sites ideally suited for hurricane forecasting and research. Knowing the temperature of a body of water that a hurricane is approaching will improve forecasts of the intensity of a hurricane at landfall. A dense network of observation sites in hurricane-prone regions will allow researchers to investigate the processes that are important during hurricane landfall and how to predict where the maximum winds and rainfall rates are going to be. Furthermore, such a network will allow numerical weather models which predict hurricane tracks and intensity to be verified and fine-tuned.