Climate and Fisheries Data Dashboard

Environmental conditions in the Northeast have changed rapidly, impacting marine resources and fisheries and resulting in the need for fisheries managers in the region to develop ecosystem based management strategies. These organizations and other fisheries stakeholders have strong interests in understanding how the changing climate is impacting or likely to impact the region. These stakeholders expressed to NOAA a "need to track the pulse of ecosystem conditions via core observations of key indicators to track current changes and provide managers with early warnings of future changes."

The Climate and Fisheries Data Dashboard is intended to be such a tool for fisheries stakeholders.

Climate-relevant data is acquired from global satellite data for key fisheries management regions of the Northeast Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem (e.g. Gulf of Maine, Georges Bank, Scotian Shelf, Mid-Atlantic Bight). Using web-based data processing tools, global datasets are subset into localized data views, and presented as interactive data visualizations. Products within the dashboard include dynamic time series graphs and map-based representations of climatologies and anomalies. Data views include climatologies (i.e., the reference levels that define expected climate conditions, like the high/low/mean and standard deviation measurements for a given characteristic for each day of the year) along with most recent conditions to see how current conditions compare to expectations. The initial suite of tools developed for the dashboard were primarily derived from satellite sea surface temperature (SST), but we are working to integrate additional data such as bottom temperatures, chlorophyll levels, primary and secondary production, and fisheries data products. The technology infrastructure and data processing approaches used to develop the dashboard and associated data products are also being leveraged for other projects (e.g., FaCeT, NASA Phenology).