Stormwater Task Force
The Lower Rio Grande Valley TPDES Stormwater Management Task Force is a joint program between the Research, Applied, Technology, Education and Service (RATES) and various municipalities all across the Rio Grande Valley to educate and improve how cities and civil engineers plan for stormwater management, as a joint effort to develop a proactive regional approach to stormwater management.
Coastal Current Modeling
RATES’ inventory includes short-, medium-, and long-range HF-Radar (CODAR). With Texas General Land Office (GLO) funding, RATES personnel commissioned and operated the first HF-Radar Network on the Texas Gulf Coast, from Corpus Christi to Roll Over Pass, primarily to support GLO spill response initiatives.
River and Estuary Observation Network (REON)
The River and Estuary Observatory Network (REON) was in 2008 by RATES and Clarkson University (Potsdam, NY) and originally comprised several seasonal moored profiling platforms and four year-round Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCPs) deployed in the Hudson River watershed and interfaced to a Real-Time Hydrologic Station (RTHS).
Flood Resiliency
The Lower Rio Grande Valley Flood Response and Resiliency Network (FRRN) is a regional collaborative effort to develop a real-time stage height and stream flow monitoring network that is coupled with a near-real-time flood forecasting tool and integrated decision support system.
Water Wizard
Water Wizard is a Decision Support Framework developed specifically to enable engineers, managers, planners and other decision makers of small and mid-sized water, wastewater and watershed management systems to maximize productivity and efficiency.
National Resource Damage Assesments (NRDA)
The Water Column Exposure Modeling Toolbox (WCEMT) is a set of modeling tools developed to meet the needs of Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDA) for viable methods to assess ecological impacts of significant marine oil spills based on limited empirically obtained petroleum chemistry data.
Community Outreach and Education
RATES and collaborates with LTSTF partners on initiatives to incorporate REON-related activities into all levels of education. RATES collaborates with local school districts and with university faculty on proposals and projects built on the content previously developed for the SENSE IT project, enabling students to build and deploy their own custom-built environmental sensors via the REON cyberinfrastructure.