Virtual Chesapeake Bay: interacting with a coupled physical/biological model

The Chesapeake Bay Virtual Environment (CBVE) is a multidisciplinary, collaborative project that fuses 3D visualizations of numerically generated output, observations and other data products into a large-scale, interactive virtual world that supports investigation of coupled physical/biological and environmental processes. Although still under development, CBVE provides an application framework for integrating circulation and biological models with the computer visualization paradigm of the virtual world. In this article, we first briefly describe the physical environment and the observed effects of winds, tides and river runoff on the Chesapeake Bay system. Then we describe the CBVE components and conclude with our efforts directed at understanding how environmental variability may affect the recruitment and retention of the larval phase of certain local marine species.