Chesapeake Bay Program Office Fiscal Year 2023 Request for Applications for: Multiple Tributary Models for the Assessment of 2035 Climate Change Risk and Other Water Quality Challenges | EPA I R3 CBP 23 10

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The Chesapeake Bay Program Office Fiscal Year 2023 Request for Applications, titled "Multiple Tributary Models for the Assessment of 2035 Climate Change Risk and Other Water Quality Challenges," is a discretionary federal funding opportunity offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is designed to support advanced, practical modeling work that helps the Chesapeake Bay partnership better understand how climate change and other water quality stressors could affect key tidal tributaries by the year 2035. The focus is on producing useful, decision-relevant science rather than purely academic model development, with an emphasis on strong technical expertise and cost-effective project design.

At the core of the opportunity is the application of a state-of-the-science unstructured grid model to simulate conditions in the tidal waters of two specific Chesapeake Bay tributaries: the Choptank River and the Patapsco River, including their embayments. EPA refers to this effort as the Multiple Tributary Model (MTM). Unstructured grid modeling is particularly valuable in complex coastal and estuarine environments because it can represent shorelines, channels, shallow flats, and embayments with variable-resolution meshes, which often improves how well a model captures circulation patterns, salinity structure, and water quality gradients in areas that are difficult to represent with simpler grid approaches.

EPA expects to make up to two awards through cooperative agreements, with the intent that there will be one award supporting modeling for the Choptank tributary system and one award supporting modeling for the Patapsco tributary system. A cooperative agreement indicates that EPA anticipates having substantial involvement in the funded work, which commonly means coordination on technical direction, alignment with program needs, data sharing, review of deliverables, and ensuring the results integrate with broader Chesapeake Bay Program efforts.

A key application rule is that each application must address only one tributary. Organizations that want to compete for funding to model both tributaries are allowed to do so, but they must submit separate applications, one focused on the Choptank and one focused on the Patapsco. This setup signals that EPA wants proposals to be tightly scoped, tributary-specific, and clearly accountable for meeting objectives in one system rather than splitting attention across both.

The opportunity has an award ceiling of $250,000 per award and anticipates two total awards. The funding instrument type is listed as a cooperative agreement, and the activity category is tied to environmental work under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), reflecting the broader federal push to invest in resilient infrastructure and climate-informed environmental management. The listing is associated with CFDA number 66.466, a common identifier used for EPA Chesapeake Bay Program assistance.

The RFA was created on May 18, 2023, with an original application closing date of July 3, 2023. Eligibility is listed broadly as "Others," with the expectation that applicants consult the detailed eligibility language in the full announcement for clarification. In practice, this label often means eligibility may include a range of non-federal entities such as universities, nonprofit organizations, interstate agencies, or other qualified institutions, but the exact boundaries would be defined in the full RFA text.

Overall, this grant opportunity is aimed at generating high-quality, tributary-scale modeling capacity for Chesapeake Bay management, specifically to assess climate change risk looking toward 2035 and to better understand other water quality challenges in these tidal systems. The intended outcome is a pair of rigorous, applied modeling efforts (one per tributary) that can inform planning, risk assessment, and management decisions by providing clearer projections and scenario-based insight into how changing conditions may affect water quality and related ecological responses.

• The Environmental Protection Agency in the environment, infrastructure investment and jobs act (iija) sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Chesapeake Bay Program Office Fiscal Year 2023 Request for Applications for: Multiple Tributary Models for the Assessment of 2035 Climate Change Risk and Other Water Quality Challenges" and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 66.466.
• This funding opportunity was created on May 18, 2023.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Jul 03, 2023. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $250,000.00 in funding.
• The number of recipients for this funding is limited to 2 candidate(s).
• Eligible applicants include: Others (see text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility for clarification).

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