The Science Working Group will foster coordination and identify regional research, modeling, and monitoring needs which can help inform state and federal agency engagement on regional acidification.
Strategically guided monitoring can better serve stakeholder near real-time data information needs, characterize key regional processes, and validate regional models that can be used to identify important geographic areas most at risk from acidification in U.S. and Canadian waters off the Northeast Atlantic coast. Some key processes that targeted observing efforts need to better resolve include quantifying the role of coastal sources of carbon or nutrient enrichment, which can exacerbate global ocean acidification trends in regional coastal waters. Real-time access to monitoring activities can also provide stakeholders with critical information about current conditions in the variable environments of the coastal ocean. Furthermore, long-term sustained monitoring offers an important means to track the rate of regional acidification.