SURA Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) Program:

The overarching goal of the Southeastern Universities Research Association’s (SURA) Coastal Ocean Observing and Prediction (SCOOP) Program is to advance environmental prediction and hazard planning for our nation’s coasts. This multi-institution collaboration between ocean scientists and IT experts is creating a distributed network of shared resources that will broaden access to the requisite data, models, computational resources, and other key components of a real-time environmental prediction system. The SCOOP “partners ” are creating a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that will enhance coastal ocean observing and modeling and enable a virtual community to share tools, resources, and ideas. In addition to serving as an integrating component of the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS), the architecture will provide the Navy with a portable suite of methodologies to manage and visualize observed and modeled data on coastal phenomena. OBJECTIVES SURA is creating a SCOOP “Grid ” that extends the interoperability enabled by the World Wide Web. The coastal community faces special challenges with respect to achieving a level of interoperability that can leverage emerging Grid technologies. With that in mind, the SCOOP Program is loosely broken into the following parallel initiatives and objectives: • Community building – Participate in outreach activities to engage the research community in identifying and addressing the technical obstacles to creating a Grid. These include the OOSTech Workshop and follow-on, the SCOOP web-sit