Home > Explore Data & Reports > Establishing National Ocean Service Priorities for Estuarine, Coastal, and Ocean Modeling: Capabilities, Gaps, and Preliminary Prioritization Factors

Citation:

Cloyd, E.T., A.P. Leonardi, D.L. Scheurer, and E.J. Turner. 2007. Establishing National Ocean Service Priorities for Estuarine, Coastal, and Ocean Modeling: Capabilities, Gaps, and Preliminary Prioritization Factors. NOAA Technical Memorandum NOS NCCOS 57. Silver Spring, MD. 56 pp.

Data/Report Type:

NOAA Technical Memorandum

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Description

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and National Ocean Service (NOS) Strategic Plans present a vision for protecting, restoring, and managing our nation's aquatic resources through proactive ecosystem approaches to management. These approaches require integrated, multidisciplinary models and coordination across research and modeling activities to provide a sound basis for decision making. For NOS to achieve its mission of providing products, services, and information that promote safe navigation, support coastal communities, sustain marine ecosystems, and mitigate coastal hazards, it must place high priority on applying existing operational models, transitioning models from research to operations, and developing new models for estuarine, coastal, and ocean waters. NOS currently provides a suite of models that support coastal management decisions. These models address myriad issues, ranging from tracking oil spills and the movement of harmful algal blooms to predicting water levels, storm surges, and hypoxia. As NOAA moves to integrate its efforts across disciplines and to support regional management, there is a greater need to align modeling efforts across NOS and to fully incorporate stakeholder input into the model development and improvement processes. This document represents an effort to coordinate approaches to modeling within NOS and with internal and external partners and to bring NOS modeling priorities in line with user communities' requirements. This report uses four management sectors to represent the breadth of NOS's responsibilities and organize user requirements: Navigation and Commerce, Coastal Hazards, Water Quality and Public Health, and Coastal Habitats. In concordance with the NOAA Requirements-Based Management Process, we have collected and assessed the legal mandates, stakeholder needs, and user requirements and identified longstanding and emerging needs in each of these sectors. The National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS/CSCOR), in conjunction with other NOS offices, has developed this document to identify major management issues requiring modeling support at the federal level; catalog NOS's current capabilities to meet these needs; highlight remaining gaps; and suggest factors to prioritize future modeling research and development investments. This document provides a foundation that NOS and its offices can both use now and build on through additional rounds of input from all sectors of the user community. User needs across all four of the management sectors include biological, chemical, ecological, physical, and socioeconomic models and products that can forecast a variety of ecosystem and human-related parameters and that support policy development and management.

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