UMass Dartmouth SMAST Visit

Last week Neil Fredrick and I visited the School of Marine Science and Technology (SMAST) at U. Mass. Dartmouth. I gave a seminar and we had some very good discussions about science and research with SMAST faculty. One thing we were very excited about was meeting Dr. Changsheng Chen, who is the developer of the FVCOM model, which we are using for our Lake Taihu project. Dr. Chen gave us some useful advice on our model and also showed us his  Northeast Coastal Ocean Forecast System (NECOFS). I spent a couple of hours playing with this system today. For someone interested in surface water quality, its really interesting technology. I made the plot below, which shows the currents at 8am today, outgoing tide. A while back, Boston discharged its wastewater at Moon Island (red circle). Then, they constructed two treatment plants, at Nut Island (green circle) and Deer Island (yellow circle). Seems like a good (or better) choice considering the currents. Now Boston has just one treatment plant at Deer Island, but the outfall is 9 miles offshore. Here is the link to the system:
http://porpoise1.smast.umassd.edu:8080/fvcomwms/