NOAA and Ships of Opportunity on the US Northeast Continental Shelf

Jack W. Jossi, Robert L. Benway, and Julien R. Goulet
NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service

Jack Jossi received a BS (biology) from Pacific University and a BS (physical oceanography) from the University of Washington. He earned an MS (marine science) from the University of Miami Florida. He has been with NOAA and its predecessor agencies since 1961 and has designed and directed various regional and international ocean monitoring programs.
Bob Benway received his initial training in marine science as a member of the United States Coast Guard. He earned an AS (Electronics Technology) from the New England Institute of Technology and has completed course work at the University of Rhode Island and the Graduate School of Oceanography. Since joining NOAA in 1972 he has been involved in the development and operation of NMFS's Ships of Opportunity Program (SOOP) and oversees and coordinates all field operations for SOOP and the MARMAP Ecosystems Monitoring Surveys.
Julien Goulet received a BS in earth sciences from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned an MS in physical oceanography from the University of Rhode Island. He has been with NOAA and its predecessor agencies since 1965, designing and implementing database management systems and applying statistical analyses to fisheries-oceanography problems.

The use of private, merchant, and military vessels on an opportunistic basis to collect oceanographic and meteorological information has a centuries-long history. Information was initially gathered by people to help them make a living from the oceans. It was shared within their communities and passed down through generations along with other valuable cultural information. As the tools for using the oceans expanded, so did the geographical range of the information being gathered. The evolution of maritime commerce and exploration went hand in hand with an increasing requirement for information about ocean currents, weather, and the location of marine resources. This information was of great value and was fiercely guarded against competing interests. The eighteenth century provided a slight easing of this proprietary policy when Benjamin Franklin, then Postmaster General, happened to discuss with Nantucket sea captain, Timothy Folger, the sluggish nature of the delivery of mail from England to New England. Folger explained that Gulf Stream information, well known to his colleagues but rejected by the mail packet captains, would reduce these trans-Atlantic crossings by two weeks. Franklin took advantage of this information to improve the mail service and began a systematic, cooperative collection of ocean current and temperature data that continues today. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the US Navy Hydrographic Office, under the command of Lt. Matthew Fontaine Maury, had compiled existing information from mariners' log books and inaugurated a hydrographic reporting program among ships' masters that led to the publication of the Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic. Maury proposed exchanging this information between maritime nations; his idea was enthusiastically adopted.
      In 1925 the British scientist, Alister Hardy, took his newly designed Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) (see Fig. 1) to the Antarctic on the Discovery expedition. His idea was to apply methods similar to those employed in meteorology to study the changing plankton distribution, its causes and effects. In 1932, he began a survey using merchant vessels in the North Sea to collect plankton at a standard depth of 10m. This survey has expanded to include the entire North Atlantic. It is the longest and most extensive marine plankton-monitoring database in existence.
     An event in 1937 must be noted for its eventual role in the use of volunteer observing ships. Athelstan Spilhaus (geophysicist, inventor, first US ambassador to UNESCO, and Sea Grant visionary) developed the mechanical bathythermograph used to obtain continuous tracings of temperature versus depth in the surface layers of the ocean. This instrument was the predecessor to the expendable bathythermograph which remains a cornerstone in ships of opportunity sampling today.
     With the formation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 1970, the US and the United Kingdom joined forces to extend the CPR survey into additional areas of the northwest Atlantic. Together they worked to develop a new generation of CPR which would continue the collection of biological data while also sampling the upper layers of the ocean with sensors for measuring physical and chemical characteristics of the environment. This partnership, represented in the US by the NOAA-Fisheries Narragansett Laboratory near the URI Bay Campus, has developed a new suite of ships of opportunity tools, such as the NuShuttle (see Fig. 2). The formation of NOAA also enhanced collaboration between the National Weather Service, the National Ocean Service, the US Maritime Administration, and the National Marine Fisheries Service to use merchant and other cooperating ocean-going ships for the collection of meteorological, physical, and biological data along regular routes extending from the United States coast. The geographical extent of this program, the sophistication of instrumentation, the kinds of data collected, and the value to the United States have all grown and should continue to do so. The program is now under the organizational umbrella of NOAA's Volunteer Ocean Ships (VOS) Program.
     The NOAA-Fisheries Narragansett Laboratory is a major participant in the VOS program, both historically and scientifically. Monthly monitoring of ocean temperature, salinity, phytoplankton, and zooplankton has been conducted between Boston and Nova Scotia for nearly 40 years; between New York and Bermuda for more than 28 years; near Georges Bank for six years (see Fig. 3). The resulting data records are among the longest of their kind for the US Atlantic coast. These time series play an essential role in NOAA's responsibility as stewards of the coastal waters of the United States. They are used to look at broadscale ecological and climatic variations, natural versus anthropogenic changes, and to develop indices of ocean health for management purposes to be used much the way economic indices are used. One important project, now underway, seeks to determine how climatic temperature change might alter the abundance and composition of lower food chain organisms.
     Plankton abundance and temperature in the Middle Atlantic Bight vary considerably throughout the year and from one year to the next. We are examining how patterns in the annual and multi-annual temperature are related to patterns of plankton abundance. Temperature is well known to affect the growth, migration, reproduction, and metabolic rates of marine organisms and is also the topic of intense research on global climate change. Any changes in the timing and magnitude of plankton cycles could have a significant impact on fish stocks which, at least during their early life stages, depend on sufficient quantities of certain plankton for their sustenance. For our research, we chose the early stages of the planktonic copepod, Calanus finmarchicus. This organism when full grown is slightly smaller than a grain of rice and, like all plankton, is carried about by ocean currents. We chose it because, in addition to being an important source of food for young fish, it has a preference for slightly colder environments. The preference for colder water is useful for analyzing the effect of changing temperature on planktonic life. Figure 4 shows the average annual variation in temperature and abundance of Calanus finmarchicus from samples taken between 1978 and 1997. All values come from a depth of 10m below the surface. The continental shelf (approximately the first 190km from the coast to water depths of about 100m) and the continental slope (from the edge of the shelf to the Gulf Stream) portions of our transect are shown in Figure 3a. The temperature on the shelf is generally colder than on the slope; both reach their annual minimum between March and April and their maximum in August. Our samples show that young Calanus finmarchicus begin the annual increase in abundance slightly before the coldest time of the year and peak four to five months before the hottest. A second pulse in abundance is seen in both water masses, the more prominent occurring in October in the shelf water. Figure 5 shows the temperature and abundance data over the two-decade period and provides a useful perspective for examining multi-year trends, cycles, and relationships between the two features. Unlike Figure 4, these features are portrayed as departures above and below the long-term average (the zero line on the y-axis) in units which have been standardized to emphasize their importance. Further, because lower temperatures were expected to relate to higher abundances of Calanus finmarchicus, the scale for plankton departures on the right of the panels has been inverted. Both features in both water masses exhibit multi-year cycles of increase and decrease. Except for a few years in either water mass series, there are no consistent, shared relationships between trends in water temperature and Calanus abundance. This is to be expected because relationships in nature are rarely so simple. However, it does suggest other approaches that may be effective. For example, Figure 4 shows that on average Calanus finmarchicus abundance begins a dramatic increase one month (in shelf waters) and at least two months (in slope waters) before the temperatures begin their spring increase. To successfully investigate the role of temperature on abundance, one must understand how the organism increases its biomass when its food is not yet plentiful. Or perhaps plankton populations are carried to the Middle Atlantic Bight from other regions, such as the western Gulf of Maine. And finally, our example combines conditions from the entire continental shelf (nearly 200km wide in this study area) and ignores annual cycles (see Fig. 4) that differ somewhat between very nearshore, midshelf, and outer shelf waters. Fortunately, data gathered by ships of opportunity permit us at the NOAA-Fisheries Narragansett Laboratory to ask and answer these questions.

Acknowledgments
The authors wish to express their appreciation to the owners, officers, and crews of the many private, military, government, and academic institutions who, over the years, have contributed their efforts to make this program possible.

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