New Gulf Monitoring System Detects Texas Dead Zone

06/30/09 - Researchers from Texas A&M University have deployed the state’s first water quality monitoring system off the Texas coast to provide hourly updates on water temperature, salinity, oxygen, waves and other information, and the system has already provided an important finding – it has detected low oxygen levels indicating the return of the dead zone to coastal Texas.

Steve DiMarco, a professor of oceanography in the College of Geosciences who has studied the Gulf of Mexico for 16 years and the dead zone areas of the Gulf since 2002, says the dead zone detected, which is located in Texas waters south of Galveston, and about nine nautical miles from shore, is already below levels considered harmful to marine life. Two years ago, DiMarco was the first to confirm that Texas had a separate dead zone area, one independent of a larger one that is found annually off the Louisiana coast.

Although the new Texas dead zone area has just been recorded, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) officials are now estimating that the Louisiana dead zone area could be the largest ever recorded – between 8,500 to 9,600 square miles, or about the size of New Jersey. The largest-ever dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico was 8,900 miles in 2002. NOAA currently does not predict the area of the Texas dead zone.

The new water system deployed in the Gulf is operated in conjunction with the Texas General Land Office and the Texas Sea Grant College Program. It has been especially constructed on an offshore wind platform that is owned and operated by Wind Energy Systems Technology of New Iberia, La., and is believed to be the first executed offshore wind lease in the nation.

“This new system demonstrates Texas’ commitment to protecting the coastal environment and helps establish its leadership in using alternative energy platforms for environmental monitoring,” DiMarco explains.

“It also is a great example of an effective partnership between academia, state and federal agencies. Data from the platform is sent to Galveston and then relayed instantly to College Station, which enables us to learn all kinds of vital information about conditions in the Gulf of Mexico, and we can get this information every half hour, or faster, if we need to.”

That includes key data about dead zones, where hypoxia, or low levels of oxygen, are prevalent. Dead zone areas can extend far out into the Gulf and in waters up to 150 feet deep. They are so named because marine life can be severely affected by the presence of low oxygen waters. They are believed to be caused in part by runoffs from large river systems such as the Mississippi, where fertilizers and nutrients flow into the Gulf from rivers and streams all over the Midwest.

The number of dead zones worldwide is believed to have doubled every 10 years since 1900.

“Using this platform that is gathering data to help market the Texas Gulf Coast to wind developers for other scientific purposes just makes sense,” says Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson. “The Texas General Land Office is always glad to work with researchers studying the Gulf.”

Data collected from the new system will be a vital source of information for scientists and a variety of industries that depend on the Gulf, says Robert Stickney, director of the Texas Sea Grant College Program, which partially funded DiMarco’s August 2007 project that first documented a hypoxic zone unique to the Texas coast.

“Scientists have known for many years that Texas’ coastal waters experienced occasional hypoxic zones not related to the well-known occurrence off Louisiana,” Stickney notes. “Dr. DiMarco’s work could help us better understand the nature, frequency and size of these low-oxygen areas, which might turn out to be more than just infrequent anomalies.”

“This finding is also a testament to the importance of establishing an offshore monitoring system. Only through better understanding of our marine environment can we make wise decisions about its use and conservation,” he adds.

The data will be publicly available through the Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System (GCOOS) Data Portal. “These are the first ocean data to be made available in real time from an offshore wind farm platform,” says Ann Jochens, regional coordinator of GCOOS, a federally funded office at Texas A&M. “This project demonstrates that society will receive the added benefit of improved environmental monitoring from the cooperative use of alternative energy platforms in the ocean.”

Research for the project is funded by the NOAA Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research.

A video of Steve DiMarco can be found at http://dmc-news.tamu.edu/templates/?a=7843&z=15.