The Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS) spans coastal waters from the Canadian Maritime Provinces to the New York Bight.
Contact Information: Jake Kritzer, Ph.D., Executive Director, jake@neracoos.org
Northeast Data Portal and Asset Viewer
About the Northeast Atlantic Region
The Northeast region is geographically complex, with five states and two Canadian Provinces, coastal waters and watersheds of the Scotian Shelf, Gulf of Maine, Southern New England Bight, and Long Island Sound. Regional user requirements have identified inundation, harmful algal blooms, water quality, ocean acidification, and living marine resources as specific concerns in the Northeastern Region.
NERACOOS provides weather and ocean data to fishers and commercial shippers determining if conditions are safe for passage and to emergency managers issuing storm warnings. NERACOOS is also advancing efforts to use these data for water quality monitoring, harmful algal bloom predictions and warnings, and coastal flooding and erosion forecasting systems.
NERACOOS is working to improve and integrate the regional coastal ocean observing system through close collaboration with regional organizations, especially the Northeast Regional Ocean Council (NROC). The NROC is a state-federal partnership that provides a forum for tackling and prioritizing regional scale problems. This collaboration will help ensure that NERACOOS directly addresses pressing regional scale issues of societal benefit. To that end, NERACOOS adopted four NROC priority theme areas and formalized the collaboration with a Memorandum of Understanding. The existing highly-leveraged observing, modeling, data integration, and product development infrastructure provides practical operational capacity in each priority area and NERACOOS activities seek to maintain the capacity previously developed.
The NROC and NERACOOS activities are as follows:
- Maritime Safety and Security – NERACOOS will provide real-time observations and forecasts directly for maritime operational safety, inform US and Canadian Coast Guard Search and Rescue Operations, and introduce new and enhance existing weather forecast products.
- Ocean and Coastal Ecosystem Health – NERACOOS will improve harmful algal bloom monitoring and forecasting, enhance monitoring and integration of water quality information, enable ecosystem based fisheries management and marine spatial planning, and monitor ocean acidification.
- Ocean Energy – NERACOOS will provide the necessary oceanographic information to facilitate the renewable energy sector and the Data Integration Framework required for a regional approach to facilities sighting.
- Coastal Hazards Resiliency – NERACOOS will enhance and evaluate street-level inundation forecasting, expand forecasts for coastal flooding and erosion, and support emergency spill response.
Additionally, climate change and Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning are central and cross-cutting themes.
Finally, continued development and implementation of a Data Management and Communication system is central to the delivery of information and products to users of the system, performance and evaluation metrics will enable tracking the return on investment, and education and outreach will engage NERACOOS users to ensure information and products meet their needs.