Dear World Community Grid members,

Welcome to the Computing for Sustainable Water (CFSW) project. We are an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Virginia in the United States. We will use the resources of the World Community Grid to assess how we might restore and sustain the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the continental United States, covering over 64,000 square miles.

The Chesapeake Bay Watershed covers parts of six Eastern states and the District of Columbia, our nation’s capital, and is home to nearly 17 million persons. As the population of the watershed has increased over the years and become more urbanized, there has been great stress placed on the health of the Bay and its aquatic species. A principal cause of the stress is human activity including agricultural practices, land development, and population growth.

There have been many proposals put forward to reverse this trend and restore the health of the Bay, but we do not fully understand how these proposals might work individually or in combination in so large a region. So to understand how these proposals might work, we developed a large-scale simulation model of the Chesapeake Bay where we explore their potential impacts over a 20 year time horizon. The goal is to inform policy makers as to which proposals will be most effective. This understanding, we believe, will be easily transferred to other areas of the world where watersheds, catchments, bays, and river systems are under similar stress.

If you would like more information about this project, please join us on April 20, 2012 at noon, Eastern Daylight Savings Time, (16:00 UTC) for a live webcast to hear an overview of the Computing for Sustainable Water project. Details for the webcast may be found here http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/about_us/viewNewsArticle.do?articleId=199.

We very much appreciate your participation in this project by the donation of spare capacity on your computer!

Sincerely,
The UVa Bay Game Team