The SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) program is working towards an integrated and coordinated coastal ocean observing and prediction system, leveraging emerging regional efforts and cutting edge Grid technologies. SCOOP ‘ s immediate goal is to provide a prototype of a distributed national laboratory for coastal research and operations, by implementing key elements of a distributed system for assessing and predicting environmental response to extreme events in the eastern U. S. coastal zone. The program will focus on numerical modeling, real-time data exchange and 24/7 operational prediction and visualization for storm surge, wind waves and surface currents, with special attention to predicting and visualizing phenomena that cause damage and inundation of coastal regions during severe storms and hurricanes. SCOOP partners include Louisiana State University, University of Alabama at Huntsville, Texas A&M University, GoMOOS, University of Florida, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NOAA, University of Maryland, University of Miami, and Virginia Institute of Marine Science. For more information about SCOOP, please contact the Project Coordinator, Philip Bogden, at bogden@gomoos.org.

The Grid research group at CCT is contributing to the information technology goals of SCOOP. Leveraging emerging Grid standards and technologies, our efforts have focused on providing 1)    A data archive for coastal and atmospheric model results as well as observational data from satellite and buoy sources. The data archive is designed to be highly available and reliable, with client tools for data ingestion, retrieval and metadata querying. The data archive is built using web services, the Grid Application Toolkit and Globus RLS. Clients can interact with the archive using a variety of existing protocols and transfer mechanisms. 2)    A grid portal providing community access to data, models, and the resources of the SCOOP Grid. The portal provides tools for querying the data archive and downloading files, monitoring the status of the SCOOP Grid and file transfer. Capabilities for deploying model scenarios, such as wave/surge ensembles are currently being added, along with functionality for visualization. The CCT grid portal is built using GridSphere and GridPortlets. 3)    A Grid environment for testing and model deployment. Machines at LSU, UFL, and UNC use the Globus Toolkit and Condor to provide a shared Grid resource. The portal provides an monitoring interface showing the status of the Grid. 4)    Prototype examples of modeling scenarios that exploit Grid technologies. Using the Grid Application Toolkit and the CCT Data Archive, we are implementing an ensemble (task farming) scenario where multiple wind inputs can be automatically located and fed into multiple wave or surge models, with the resulting data being staged to the data archive. The CCT SCOOP team includes Gabrielle Allen (Lead), Jon MacLaren (Manager and Data Archive), Andrei Hutanu (Visualization), Ian Kelley (GridSphere), Chirag Dekate (Models and SCOOP Grid), Chongjie Zhang (SCOOP Portal), Dayong Huang (Data clients), Zhou Lei (Grid Application Toolkit), Archit Kulshrestha (Condor), Sasanka Madiraju (SCOOP Grid) and Edward Jerome Tate (Visualization). The CCT SCOOP team can be reached at scoop@cct.lsu.edu.