Facilities & Laboratories
Coastal Security Institute
The United States has 95,000 miles of coastline, and the nearshore regions are home to about two-thirds of the nation's population, as well as major industries, ecologically and economically important natural resources and some of the world's busiest maritime traffic. To keep our coastlines safe, PNNL's Coastal Security Institute addresses critical needs in four areas: intelligence analysis, homeland security, national defense and global security.
The Institute is developing methods to more accurately and rapidly detect, identify and characterize dynamic coastal environmental phenomena and events. The second major goal of the Institute is to provide measurement, assessment and interpretation tools and capabilities to federal, state, tribal, local governments and to groups in the commercial sector charged with the security of the U.S. coastal zone.
The Institute leverages PNNL's broad science base to achieve advances in many areas, including
- Detection systems, such as marine and biosensors, biomonitors and living organisms
- Signature collection, analysis and characterization
- Information gathering and analysis, geospatial analysis, three-dimensional visualization and data fusion
- Remote sensing
- Coastal assessment, remediation and restoration, including coastal and nearshore mapping and monitoring, port and harbor security and coastal vulnerability assessment
- Fate and transport modeling
- Ultra-low-level chemical analysis
- Contaminant effects evaluations and risk assessment.
The Institute also can provide research, development, testing and evaluation for a variety of coastal warfare scenarios, as well as technologies for remotely operated aerial and underwater vehicles.