California Current Ecosystem: Inorganic Carbon and Nutrient Profiles from Mooring Cruises

The U.S. West Coast California Current Ecosystem provides data from annual servicing cruises to CCE1 and CCE2 moorings. It includes dissolved inorganic carbon, total alkalinity, nutrients, chlorophyll-a, and CTD measurements from discrete water samples. The dataset is collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Calibrating and validating ocean acidification models based on DIC and total alkalinity measurements.
• Analyzing nutrient dynamics in coastal upwelling zones based on nitrate, silicate, and phosphate data.
• Studying event-scale biological phenomena based on chlorophyll-a and phaeopigment time-series.
• Validating sensor data from mooring platforms based on discrete CTD and bottle sample comparisons.

Strengths

• Data is collected from two strategically located moorings (CCE1 and CCE2) representing offshore and shelf-break environments.
• Includes a multidisciplinary suite of variables: carbon chemistry, nutrients, pigments, and physical oceanography.
• Mooring data is transmitted in real-time and updated every 6 hours, supporting near-real-time analysis.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• The dataset's temporal coverage from the annual cruises is not explicitly stated.

Provenance

Source

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Department of Commerce

Collection Method

Profile and discrete observations using CTD, Niskin bottle, and other instruments from R/V New Horizon and R/V Robert Gordon Sproul.

Time Range

Temporal coverage is not explicitly stated in the input.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-05 23:05:52.856068; freshness should be verified.

Geography

U.S. West Coast, specifically the California Current at CalCOFI stations 80.80 (CCE1) and 80.55 (CCE2).