Silicon Bay:

An advanced computer system called REINAS
transforms environmental science in Monterey Bay

By Robert Irion

Above: Undergraduate Zoë Wood and Assistant Professor Alex Pang examine an image generated by UCSC's innovative REINAS computer system. The image depicts environmental data collected by instruments along the central California coast--revealing temperatures and wind velocities above San Francisco Bay and charting the currents within Monterey Bay. (photo: r. r. jones)


Monterey Bay is under constant surveillance. The spies are weather sensors, marine instruments, and other robotic eyes set up in the bay and around its rim. The daunting task of a team of UCSC engineers is to gather information from that array, store it for easy access, and display it on demand--all at the click of a mouse.

That's the essence of the Real-time Environmental Information Network and Analysis System, or REINAS, a $4.7 million project led by UC Santa Cruz. Now near the end of its five-year grant from the Office of Naval Research, REINAS is fulfilling its charge of bringing environmental science into a more intimate relationship with state-of-the-art computer technology.

With REINAS, meteorologists and oceanographers can ask for air and water temperatures, barometric pressures, winds, currents, precipitation, and other records from the Monterey Bay region. Researchers can examine the data as raw numbers, two-dimensional plots, or 3-d graphics with some of the most advanced visualization tools yet devised. They can fetch measurements from years ago, archived in a reliable database. Or, they can sit at their workstations and watch changes around the bay as they occur, with updates as fast as every ten seconds.

The power of this approach is clear for scientists who strive to understand the complex ways in which land, sea, and air interact near the shore. Breezes, squalls, dense fog, and shifting currents are part of life in Monterey Bay, but how they arise and evolve is still mysterious. REINAS has begun to lift the veil shrouding those processes.

"REINAS has served as a catalyst to bring high-end computer techniques to bear on meteorological issues," says collaborator Wendell Nuss, associate professor of meteorology at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "It has dramatically accelerated our ability to do science."

Future systems based on the REINAS model may make predicting the weather faster and more accurate. With networks of instruments spaced as closely as those in REINAS, meteorologists could narrow down their forecasts to regions where the weather changes rapidly. Ship captains could use the latest information about the ocean to guide their decisions, such as directing a rescue fleet or tracking an oil spill through the vagaries of nearshore currents.

The REINAS team is now seeking funding to preserve its successful prototype system as a working regional laboratory for environmental research along the central coast. The researchers also would like to extend their technologies and software to similar coastal regions in southern California and in Oregon.

"Our aim is to support real-time forecasting in meteorology and real-time applications in oceanography," says project leader Patrick Mantey, UCSC's new associate dean for engineering (see story, page 21) and Jack Baskin Professor of Computer Engineering. "The biggest challenge has been to pull together diverse data from satellites, instruments on land and on buoys, and computer models, and put it all into a picture so a researcher can get a synthesized view."

To reach that goal, the REINAS team has focused on three areas:

Data acquisition. Researchers led by Daniel Fernandez (formerly at UCSC, now at CSU Monterey Bay) and recent Ph.D. recipient Eric Rosen set up Internet links with about a dozen instrument packages at sites in and around the bay, ranging from ridgetops to the coastline and to ships offshore. The resulting network paints a continual portrait of the region's winds, waves, and weather.

"Computer technology has reached the level where we can put instruments in place, often in remote areas and in extreme conditions, and talk to them as if they were down the hall," says Rosen. "We've brought environmental data collection into the 1990s."

Data management. Associate professor of computer science Darrell Long and his colleagues built a database comprising hundreds of scattered computer components. There is no central data "warehouse." Rather, the REINAS architecture resembles a baywide, impeccably organized filing system. It's invisible to the user, who just submits a query and gets a reply. For example, one might ask for hourly wind velocities up to four kilometers high at Moss Landing on August 9, 1996. Within a few seconds, a plot would flash on the screen.

This system handles several CDs worth of new data per day--the equivalent, says Long, of hundreds of phone books or several hundred thousand typewritten pages. As the team adds more sources, such as a National Weather Service radar station on a nearby peak, the deluge will only grow.

Visualization. Assistant professor of computer science Alex Pang and his coworkers created new techniques that expose
hidden aspects of data. Users construct their own graphics by choosing from among different tools. One versatile program, called "Spray," lets researchers inject "smart particles" into a graphic to highlight parts of the data. For instance, ribbons of color might reveal the altitudes above the bay where the temperature is exactly 60°f.

Pang's work stresses scientific utility over glitz. His team is now inventing ways to show the user how much error may exist within data sets. For example, a researcher may wish to ignore wind velocities recorded at a site with tall trees nearby. "Most computer graphics today provide nice pictures, but no information about how confident users should be in what they see," Pang says.

As UCSC researchers have tackled these challenges, they have forged strong bonds with collaborators at the Naval Postgraduate School, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and other institutions in the bay's "research crescent." Indeed, REINAS is part of a national effort to foster ties between computer experts and environmental scientists, who usually approach problems in different ways.

"We've had classic debates about how to develop the system, but it's been tremendously stimulating," says Wendell Nuss. "At first I wasn't convinced it was necessary, but now I've become a real believer in the value of a database where I can access data for any day in a consistent format and in creative visual ways."

Along the way, the project has won other converts: ordinary citizens, who log onto REINAS by the thousands. These casual users care only about how warm it is at the beach or whether there's a righteous swell in Santa Cruz. For the latter, they can click on the latest photo of the bay from the "Slug Video" camera atop the oceanfront Dream Inn hotel--a camera plugged into the REINAS network. So far, that page on the World Wide Web has tallied about 2.5 million "hits."

"We've been able to satisfy so many different users, from scientists to people who want to know if it's a good day to go windsurfing," says Eric Rosen. "I view that as a big success."

You may view REINAS data on the World Wide Web at http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/reinas.html.