Time Series Allows Investigation of Wind Forcing and Physical and Bio-Optical Variability

From Dever et al., 29 September 2019

The full scope of OOI Endurance Array surface moorings has been deployed since April 2015. The moorings are deployed off Grays Harbor, Washington and Newport, Oregon at inner shelf, shelf and slope depths. They include surface meteorology, physical oceanographic, chemical and biological sensors. During the summer of 2019, EA staff reviewed mooring data since inception. In September 2019, we presented a poster of these data at the annual Eastern Pacific Ocean Conference (EPOC). The objectives of the poster were to show the time series data and discuss their availability and quality issues with research community members. To stimulate discussion, we reported on seasonal variability in wind forcing, water temperature, and chl-a fluorescence. We described the mooring measurements and how to access the data.

The Oregon and Washington shelves are part of the northern California Current Marine Ecosystem. They exhibit characteristic responses to spring and summer upwelling winds and winter storms. In the above figure, we show representative time series of near surface measurements at the Oregon shelf mooring since its start in April 2015 through the present. As part of the poster, we also presented similar data from the other OOI surface moorings and calculated lagged correlations between wind, temperature, and chlorophyll, and commented on the observed variability.

We also pointed viewers to example Matlab and Python scripts to download and plot the OOI data presented in the poster via the Machine to Machine (M2M) interface on the OOI Data Portal.