The Data Trawler is a Java application that has been developed under the auspices of the North West Shelf Joint Environmental Management Project (NWS JEMS) and the CMAR Data Centre. This application provides on-line access to the data in the Data Warehouse, an Oracle data repository. See MarLIN record 6390 for details of the Warehouse. The Trawler's primary functions are to allow users to: Discover - Discover data of interest using geographic, temporal and data category search criteria. Investigate - View a brief summary of any data sets returned which meet the search criteria and display their spatial distribution. Download - Place desired datasets into a data "shopping basket" and then download them to your local computer. To get the full benefit out of using the application a user is required to provide an email address (a logon) and a password. If you are not a CMR staff member or other authorised user you will be allowed access to the Warehouse as a "Public User". Public users have only limited access to Warehouse content. See the Data Link to access the CMR Data Trawler.

The Auslig 250k series 1 Topograpic data (Geoscience Australia 2000) was used along with a North West Shelf coastline contour to generate a 0.008 degree grid using the ArcInfo topogrid command. This was merged with the AGSO bathymetric 30 second grid (Geoscience Australia) to form a complete bathymetric and topographic grid at 0.008 degree resolution for the complete North West Shelf study area. Finally this grid was projected to a Lambert Conformal Conic projection for use by the model. Conformal projections, ensure that scale is invariant in all directions locally, but large grids/areas will be distorted because of differential 'stretching' of areas across large scales.

The data-rich screens of the NWS Technical User Interface mainly serve for analysis of raw inputs into InVitro, the spatially explicit agent-based biophysical simulation model at the core of this Study. The software is written in Java.

This Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) model was developed for the North West Shelf and the food web upon which it is based. The fishery of the area has been variable over the years. Bulman attempts to capture the trophic flows and biomasses during the late 1980s. At this time, the foreign fishery had reduced considerably following closures and the domestic fisheries were expanding. Fifteen years of catch and effort data were used to tune the model, i.e., annual fishing effort data were input in order to try to recreate the actual changes in the system caused by fishing.

Model of Estuaries and Coastal Oceans (MECO) is a a three dimensional, non-linear, variable density, hydrodynamic model. It is intended to be a general purpose hydrodynamic model for estuaries and coastal oceans providing distributions of velocity, temperature and salinity as well as concentrations of passive tracers given input fluxes of water, passive tracers and forcing by winds, atmospheric pressure gradients, tides and surface heat fluxes. The equations forming the basis of the model are similar to those described in Blumberg and Herring (1987), except that the model uses z-coordinates, rather than sigma coordinates in the vertical. MECO is written in the C language, and uses the netCDF data format for input and output files. The MECO model has evolved into the Sparse Hydrodynamic Ocean Code (SHOC). SHOC has been in use since 2003 and is the hydrodynamic model used by the Coastal Environmental Modelling Team (CEM). Information regarding SHOC can be found at the CEM website. (please see link below)

This group of files are the configuration files used in the NWSJEMS MSE runs. A start or end time of 0 indicates that the agent will commence (or end) with the entire simulation rather than on a specific date. The configuration parameters typically include the latitude and longitude of their starting position or extent, whether they are to be tracked, their periodicity of output and a sting list of other agent types they may be interested in.

This group of links are the input data used in the NWSJEMS MSE runs. This metadata record contains the links to all the metadata records for the input data. Access to input data for InVitro is controlled through the input data source.

Official NWSJEMS Study Area boundary. Bounding box extends from west of North West Cape to Port Hedland. This study area boundary is based on the extent of data used for modelling purposes.

This Access database contains the NWSJEMS Contaminants Inventory of data from 1985 to 2001. Spatial information is contained in related shapefile datasets described in Marlin (see Attributes)

The NWSJEMS Contaminants Inventory contains primary contaminant load data: polygon data shows spatial location of outflows to the marine environment and time series of contaminant shows loads and species of contaminant.