Leveraging Coastal Research Assets to Decipher Human Impacts & Track Extreme Events
(Click to enlarge) Photo Credit: OOI Regional Scale Nodes program and the Center for Environmental Visualization, University of Washington
The coastal OOI is comprised of two arrays. The Endurance Array will be located in the Northeast Pacific off the coast of Washington and Oregon. The Pioneer Array will be located in the Northwest Atlantic off the coast of New England. The coastal OOI will enhance and expand upon existing coastal observing assets, providing unique research approaches to many complex problems in the coastal environment. These problems include the extreme variability of large and meso-scale coastal ocean circulation, material mass balance (e.g., nutrient and carbon fluxes across the continental shelves between land and ocean), ecosystem stability and change, coastal morphology, beach erosion, and other anthropogenic dimensions of land-sea interaction.
Coastal observatories are especially needed to enable basic research on sustained time scales, allowing observation of episodic and extreme events. A variety of technologies and observational assets will be employed to gather data in the coastal region including moored buoys, cables, surface radars, AUVs, airborne and satellite sensors, together with conventional ships.
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, along with its partners, Oregon State University and Scripps Institution of Oceanography, serves as the Implementing Organization (IO) for the Coastal portion of the OOI.
