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CORIE is a pilot environmental observation and forecasting system (EOFS) for the Columbia River. It integrates a real-time sensor network, a data management system and advanced numerical models.

Through this integration, we seek to characterize and predict complex circulation and mixing processes in a system encompassing the lower river, the estuary and the near-ocean. The acquired knowledge is transformed into data products designed to provide objective insights on the spatial and temporal variability of the Lower Columbia River.

As a scientific tool, CORIE is designed to advance the emerging field of environmental information systems, and the understanding of river-dominated estuaries and plumes.

The scientific objectivity and breadth of products of CORIE also gives the region's natural resource management and regulation community powerful new planning and analysis tools to improve policies and decisions.

Early applications of CORIE have, in particular, addressed issues combining salmon habitat and passage, hydropower management, navigation improvements and habitat restoration. These applications show that there is a role for objective science to engender consensus across agencies with conflicting mandates. They also suggest that coordinating resources of multiple users of a waterway in the development of a shared scientific infrastructure, readily adaptable to evolving needs, might be a practical way to develop affordable management tools.

Rapidly advancing performance and declining costs of electronic and computer technology will soon make EOFS economically feasible. The experience of systems like CORIE will encourage and provide paradigms for the development of national and international networks of EOFS, to the benefit of science and society.

CORIE is being developed at the OGI School of Science & Engineering of the Oregon Heath & Science University, by an interdisciplinary team under the scientific direction of Prof. António M. Baptista

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