Two Decades of Mooring and Ship-Based Observations from the Newport Hydrographic Line

(left)Time series of a) temperature b) salinity and c) meridional velocity from the Oregon shelf site.  Time series exist at this site starting in 1997.  The OOI time series begin in summer 2014 for the Regional Cabled Array and spring 2015 for the uncabled Endurance Array.  For clarity, only 2012-2022 are shown.  Prior to OOI, the site was named NH-10.  Adapted from Figures 6, 7, and 8 Risien et al. (2022)Risien et al. (2022), Making Available More Than Two Decades of Mooring and Ship-Based Observations from the Newport Hydrographic Line, OT06-01, presented at Ocean Sciences Meeting 2022, Honolulu, HI (virtual), 4 Mar.

C.M. Risien, M.R. Fewings, J.L. Fisher, B.T. Cervantes, C.A. Morgan, J.A. Barth, P.M. Kosro, J.O. Peterson, W.T. Peterson, and M.D. Levine

In the Northern California Current System (NCCS), during spring and summer months, equatorward winds drive the upwelling of cold, nutrient-rich, and oxygen-poor waters from depth onto the shelf, fueling a highly productive marine ecosystem that supports valuable commercial fisheries. Oceanographic conditions in the NCCS vary on temporal scales from hours to decades. In contrast, grant-funded research typically consists of shorter-term studies (3-5 years). While such studies resolve intra-annual and perhaps inter-annual variability, they do not capture decadal scale variability that is critical for climate studies.

Risien et al. (2022), present two new decadal-scale data products. The first is ~550 gridded, cross-shelf hydrographic sections of temperature, salinity, potential density, spiciness, and dissolved oxygen from data collected biweekly to monthly from March 1997 to present along the Newport Hydrographic Line (NHL; 44.6°N, 124.1–124.65°W) off Newport, Oregon, USA, mostly by NOAA programs. They also present monthly climatologies derived from these observations.

The second data product is 23 years (1999–2021) of mooring temperature, salinity and velocity data — collected by five programs (OSU-NOPP, GLOBEC, OrCOOS, NANOOS/CMOP, OOI) at NH-10 (44.6°N, 124.3°W), 10 nautical miles west of Newport, Oregon along the NHL — that they stitched together into one coherent, quality-controlled data set (see figure above).

Making available such multi-decadal data sets, which they plan to release via public repositories, is essential to enable scientists to characterize natural and anthropogenically-forced variability; resolve cause-and-effect relationships in Earth’s climate and marine ecosystems at intra-seasonal, seasonal, inter-annual and decadal time scales; and verify climate models. These new gridded and concatenated data products show that long-term ocean observing efforts require multi-generational teams with a wide range of skills and a shared vision that is motivated by science and ocean monitoring needs.