A high-resolution synthesis dataset for multistressor analyses along the U.S. West Coast

• Main Authors: Kennedy, Esther G., Zulian, Meghan, Hamilton, Sara L., Hill, Tessa M., Delgado, Manuel, Fish, Carina R., Gaylord, Brian, Kroeker, Kristy J., Palmer, Hannah M., Ricart, Aurora M., Sanford, Eric, Spalding, Ana K., Ward, Melissa, Carrasco, Guadalupe, Elliott, Meredith, Grisby, Genece V., Harris, Evan, Jahncke, Jaime, Rocheleau, Catherine N., Westerink, Sebastian, Wilmot, Maddie I.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Ocean acidification
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-205; https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-205/

The global trends of ocean warming, deoxygenation, and acidification are not easily extrapolated to coastal environments. Local factors, including intricate hydrodynamics, high primary productivity, freshwater inputs, and pollution, can exacerbate or attenuate global trends and produce complex mosaics of physiologically stressful conditions for organisms. In the California Current System (CCS), oceanographic monitoring programs document some of this complexity; however, data fragmentation and limited data availability constrain our understanding of when and where stressful coastal conditions manifest. Here, we undertake a large data synthesis to compile, format, and quality-control publicly available oceanographic data to create an accessible database for coastal CCS climate risk mapping, available at the National Centers for Environmental Information (Accession 0277984) under the DOI 10.25921/2vve-fh39 (Kennedy et al., 2023). With this synthesis, we combine publicly available observations and data contributed by the author team from synoptic oceanographic cruises, autonomous sensors, and shore samples with relevance to coastal ocean acidification and hypoxia (OAH) risk. This large-scale compilation includes 13.7 million observations from 67 sources. Here, we discuss the quality and composition of the synthesized dataset, the spatial and temporal distribution of available data, and examples of potential analyses. This dataset will provide a valuable tool for assessing regional and local climate risk, evaluating the efficacy and completeness of CCS monitoring efforts, and investigating spatiotemporal scales of coastal oceanographic variability.