Description: The landscape of applied ocean technology is rapidly changing with forces of innovation emerging from basic ocean science research methodologies as well as onshore high tech sectors. There is a critical need for ocean-related industries to continue to modernize via the adoption of state-of-the-art practices to advance rapidly changing industry objectives, maintain competitiveness, and be careful stewards of the ocean as a common resource. These objectives are of national importance for the dynamic ocean energy sector, and a mechanism by which new and promising technologies can be validated and adopted in an open and benchmarked process is needed. POWER-US seeks to develop Ocean Test Beds as research and development infrastructure capable of driving innovative observations, modeling, and monitoring of the physical, biological, and use characteristics present in offshore wind energy installation areas.

Description: AK acknowledges internal support from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via the Houghton Foundation Award.

Description: Workshop held August 19-21, 2014, Woods Hole, MA

Description: Relative to their surface area, continental margins represent some of the largest carbon fluxes in the global ocean, but sparse and sporadic sampling in space and time makes these systems difficult to characterize and quantify. Recognizing the importance of continental margins to the overall North American carbon budget, terrestrial and marine carbon cycle scientists have been collaborating on a series of synthesis, carbon budgeting, and modeling exercises for coastal regions of North America, which include the Gulf of Mexico, the Laurentian Great Lakes (LGL), and the coastal waters of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. The Coastal CARbon Synthesis (CCARS) workshops and research activities have been conducted over the past several years as a partner activity between the Ocean Carbon and Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program and the North American Carbon Program (NACP) to synthesize existing data and improve quantitative assessments of the North American carbon budget.

Description: The authors of this science plan wish to acknowledge the generous support of NASA (NNX10AU78G) and NSF (OCE-1107285) for all of the CCARS activities, including a kickoff meeting (December 2010), a series of regional workshops (Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico, Pacific coast), and the final community workshop (August 2014).

Description: © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in WHOI Fennel, K., Alin, S., Barbero, L., Evans, W., Bourgeois, T., Cooley, S., Dunne, J., Feely, R. A., Martin Hernandez-Ayon, J., Hu, X., Lohrenz, S., Muller-Karger, F., Najjar, R., Robbins, L., Shadwick, E., Siedlecki, S., Steiner, N., Sutton, A., Turk, D., Vlahos, P., & Wang, Z. A. Carbon cycling in the north american coastal ocean: A synthesis. Biogeosciences, 16(6), (2019):1281-1304, doi:10.5194/bg-16-1281-2019.

Description: A quantification of carbon fluxes in the coastal ocean and across its boundaries with the atmosphere, land, and the open ocean is important for assessing the current state and projecting future trends in ocean carbon uptake and coastal ocean acidification, but this is currently a missing component of global carbon budgeting. This synthesis reviews recent progress in characterizing these carbon fluxes for the North American coastal ocean. Several observing networks and high-resolution regional models are now available. Recent efforts have focused primarily on quantifying the net air–sea exchange of carbon dioxide (CO2). Some studies have estimated other key fluxes, such as the exchange of organic and inorganic carbon between shelves and the open ocean. Available estimates of air–sea CO2 flux, informed by more than a decade of observations, indicate that the North American Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) acts as a sink of 160±80 Tg C yr−1, although this flux is not well constrained. The Arctic and sub-Arctic, mid-latitude Atlantic, and mid-latitude Pacific portions of the EEZ account for 104, 62, and −3.7 Tg C yr−1, respectively, while making up 51 %, 25 %, and 24 % of the total area, respectively. Combining the net uptake of 160±80 Tg C yr−1 with an estimated carbon input from land of 106±30 Tg C yr−1 minus an estimated burial of 65±55 Tg C yr−1 and an estimated accumulation of dissolved carbon in EEZ waters of 50±25 Tg C yr−1 implies a carbon export of 151±105 Tg C yr−1 to the open ocean. The increasing concentration of inorganic carbon in coastal and open-ocean waters leads to ocean acidification. As a result, conditions favoring the dissolution of calcium carbonate occur regularly in subsurface coastal waters in the Arctic, which are naturally prone to low pH, and the North Pacific, where upwelling of deep, carbon-rich waters has intensified. Expanded monitoring and extension of existing model capabilities are required to provide more reliable coastal carbon budgets, projections of future states of the coastal ocean, and quantification of anthropogenic carbon contributions.

Description: This paper builds on synthesis activities carried out for the second State of the Carbon Cycle Report (SOCCR2). We would like to thank Gyami Shrestha, Nancy Cavallero, Melanie Mayes, Holly Haun, Marjy Friedrichs, Laura Lorenzoni, and Erica Ombres for the guidance and input. We are grateful to Nicolas Gruber and Christophe Rabouille for their constructive and helpful reviews of the paper. It is a contribution to the Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON), the Integrated Marine Biosphere Research (IMBeR) project, the International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project (IOCCP), and the Cooperative Institute of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (CIMAS) under cooperative agreement NA10OAR4320143. Katja Fennel was funded by the NSERC Discovery program. Steven Lohrenz was funded by NASA grant NNX14AO73G. Ray Najjar was funded by NASA grant NNX14AM37G. Frank Muller-Karger was funded through NASA grant NNX14AP62A. This is Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory contribution number 4837 and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory contribution number 8284. Simone Alin and Richard A. Feely also thank Libby Jewett and Dwight Gledhill of the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program for their support.