Marine sciences assistant professor Mike Whitney leans over his laptop, perched on a long, bare bench top in his newly-renovated laboratory at UConn’s Avery Point Campus. As he types commands, one of three gigantic flat-screen TVs on the wall pops up a map of the Long Island Sound. Whitney points to areas on the display that are colored in resplendent greens, blues, and reds, each illustrating the concentration of salt at different points in the waterway.

“The Sound is a lot less salty than the ocean because of all the river inflows from the mainland,” he explains. “Every input to the estuary changes it in some way.”

Over his shoulder, just visible through the window, the waters of the Thames River flow into the Sound against Avery Point’s rocky shoreline.

Whitney’s research involves creating mathematical models that predict the water circulation in areas where rivers meet the ocean – called estuaries – and translating these patterns into colorful, dynamic maps. The dynamics in large, wide estuaries like the Sound are not well understood by scientists because they often behave differently than smaller, more common ones.

The National Science Foundation has just awarded Whitney a five-year, $599,786 Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Grant to develop improved modeling techniques and to study the effects of freshwater inflows to Long Island Sound.

“If you collect data from one part of the Sound, it won’t represent another part of the Sound,” he says. “That’s why we need these high-resolution models – to provide information at every location.”

Rivers that flow into estuaries are important because the saltiness, or salinity, of water determines its density, which in turn governs where and when it moves. River water flowing into the Sound not only dilutes the Sound’s ocean water, but brings with it materials collected from upstream lands, such as nutrients, organic matter, carbon, and metals – all of which can pollute the estuary. If scientists know where the fresh water goes, Whitney says, they can more accurately track the fate of pollutants in the Sound.

As a physical oceanographer, Whitney creates his models using specific data on the water’s depth and tides, its temperature, the strength of local winds, and the inputs from rivers. These models are so complex that they can take his laboratory’s computing cluster, made up of 50 linked high-speed processors, up to three days to calculate circulation for a six-month period.

Although Whitney can gather much of his data from archived sources, such as the U.S. Geological Survey, reliable information is scarce about the amount and timing of many freshwater inflows to the Sound. During large rainstorms, rivers of all sizes – from the large Connecticut River to the smaller Mill River – will flood, dumping more fresh water into the Sound than usual. The contributions from the many local rivers are missing or poorly represented in existing models.

To address this problem, Whitney and marine sciences undergraduate Michelle Slater have begun identifying Connecticut rivers that feed into the Sound, linking them to available data on surrounding watersheds, and finding precipitation and river flow information for each river’s mouth. They will map these watersheds onto Google Earth and estimate the amount of freshwater each river contributes to the Sound during normal and stormy conditions. Whitney, a post-doctoral researcher, and a graduate student will use this information to develop watershed models of these coastal areas that will be linked to the estuary model.

“We want to have all the freshwater inputs correct, so we can know how fresh the water really is and where it circulates,” says Whitney.

The CAREER Grant also supports outreach efforts. Whitney will collaborate with Project Oceanology, a marine science educational program based at Avery Point. He plans to show middle-school students weather radars of recent local climatic events, then link these to his observations to show them how his models work.

Working with Project Oceanology is dear to Whitney’s heart: he participated in their educational programs as a boy growing up in Ledyard, Conn. Since returning to the area to join UConn’s marine sciences faculty in 2006, he’s been collecting data to address some of the issues he says he noticed when he was young.

“When you’re near the coast, you notice things, but you don’t realize that there’s a lot more to the Sound than just the coast,” he says. “I love that I can now apply my knowledge to my home estuary.”