Transforming Chesapeake Bay Water Forecasting

Cape Charles Pier, Credit: © Kyle - stock.adobe.com

With support from NOAA, the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) and partners have launched a new suite of advanced water quality and harmful algal bloom (HAB) forecasting tools for the Chesapeake Bay within the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Forecasting System (CBEFS). These tools offer improved real-time ecological forecasts and publicly accessible decision support tools.

These advances will help:

• Anglers receive more accurate, timely information for commercial and recreational fishing activities
• Shellfish growers plan and protect aquaculture harvests and increase yields
• Coastal managers make decisions to protect communities and increase resilience
• Scientists conduct research to better understand the Bay
• The general public stay informed about regional conditions including HABs, water quality, and marine heat waves

With this significant upgrade, the operational forecast timescale was expanded from 2 to 5 days to offer Chesapeake Bay anglers and other watermen greater lead times to plan. A wind-wave model was integrated for storm forecasting, and automated alert systems for HAB and marine heat wave forecasts were created. CBEFS includes data from both the NOAA-VIMS supported Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in VA's Virginia Estuarine & Coastal Observing System and NOAA's Chesapeake Bay Interpretive Buoy System. It allows users to monitor current Bay conditions, including several stations that track dissolved oxygen from the surface to the bottom.

The team developed the first machine learning-based forecasting model for the HAB species Prorocentrum minimum, a common source of blooms in the Bay, and found that water temperature, salinity, pH, solar irradiance, and nitrogen availability are key drivers of those blooms. The team also developed forecast models for six additional HAB groups and combined them to generate a unified forecast for blooms caused by any of the seven species. By combining environmental models with artificial intelligence, HAB forecasts are more accurate than ever before.

Additionally, the team generated and validated a dataset of historical (1985-2025) Bay conditions from the model, developing a digital atlas of 27 physical and biogeochemical variables that provides a foundation for better understanding Chesapeake Bay water quality.

The team, led by Marjorie Friedrichs, Ph.D., at VIMS with partners from the University of Maryland, FlowWest, and NOAA, launched these significant upgrades to CBEFS following a five-year modeling project through the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System's Coastal Ocean Modeling Testbed program. The project began in 2013 to develop hypoxia forecasts, and then to advance HAB and pathogen forecasting in the Chesapeake Bay based on feedback from anglers and aquaculturists.

Through these advances, the project made significant contributions to NOAA's mission to protect coastal ecosystems and provide actionable information to coastal communities. Explore the results using MARACOOS OceansMap, the IOOS Model Viewer, or the CBEFS Dashboard. Read more about the economic benefits of CBEFS in the Benefits of Ocean Observing Catalog (BOOC).

A sampling of the new and expanded forecasts available through the Chesapeake Bay Environmental Forecast System.