An Environmental Information System for Hypoxia in Corpus Christi Bay: A WATERS Network Testbed Evan Coopersmith 1 and Barbara S. Minsker 2 , University of Illinois, Urbana, IL David Maidment 3 and Ben Hodges 4 , University of Texas, Austin, TX James Bonner 5 and Temitope Ojo 6 , Texas A&M University, College Station, TX Paul Montagna 7 , Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi, TX 1 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Illinois, 205 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801; PH (610) 639-2087; email: ecooper2@uiuc.edu 2 Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois, 205 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL, 61801; PH (217) 265- 5293; FAX (217) 333 -6968; email: minsker@uiuc.edu 3 Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station C1700, Austin, TX 78712; PH (512) 471-0065; FAX (512) 471-0072; email: maidment@mail.utexas.edu 4 Department of Civil Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station C1700, Austin, TX 78712; PH (512) 471-4730; email: hodges@mail.utexas.edu 5 Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University – College Station, Mailstop #3136, College Station, Texas 77843; PH (979) 845-9770; email: bonner@tamu.edu 6 Department of Civil Engineering, Texas A&M University - College Station, Mailstop #3136, College Station, Texas 77843; PH (979) 458-3878; email: tojo@serf.tamus.edu 7 Harte Research Institute, Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi, Mailstop #5869, Corpus Christi, Texas 78412; PH (361) 825-2040; email: paul.montagna@tamucc.edu Abstract This project is creating and demonstrating a prototype Environmental Information System (EIS) that couples sensor measurements with end-to-end cyberinfrastructure to improve understanding of hypoxia in Corpus Christi Bay (CC Bay), Texas. Hypoxia is a common estuarine phenomenon that occurs when dissolved oxygen concentrations fall below 2 mg/L, and has resulted in about a ten-fold reduction in benthic standing stock and diversity in CC Bay. The hypoxia in CC Bay is correlated with salinity- induced stratification of the bay, but the stratification forcing and the spatial and temporal patterns of the hypoxia remain uncertain. In this project, an interdisciplinary team of hydrologists, environmental engineers, biologists, and computer scientists are collaborating to improve understanding of hypoxia by: (1) creating an Environmental Data Access System for CC Bay data archives, leveraging CUAHSI Hydrologic Information System (HIS) Web service developments to create data services that automatically ingest observed data in both national and local remote data archives; (2) developing an Environmental Modeling System for CC Bay hypoxia, leveraging NCSA Environmental Cyberinfrastructure Demonstrator (ECID) CyberIntegrator technology to combine numerical hydrodynamic, dissolved oxygen, and oxygen demand models with data mining using hierarchical machine learning algorithms; and (3) demonstrating the effectiveness of the EIS for supporting adaptive hypoxia sampling and collaborative research using ECID’s CyberCollaboratory. This paper will give initial results and future plans for the project. Introduction The environmental engineering and hydrologic communities are collaborating, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), to define a national environmental observatory network called the WATERS (WATer and Environmental Research Systems) Network to enhance understanding of water science. Elements of an observatory program include sensor networks for real-time measurement of water conditions and cyberinfrastructure to integrate streams of observed data and simulation model results into