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Full catalog/JSCOPE
JSCOPE·dataset

Seasonal Pacific Northwest coastal ocean forecasts (NOAA J-SCOPE)

NOAA JISAO’s Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem (J-SCOPE)
ocean NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Experimental forecasts six to nine months ahead for the ocean off Washington and Oregon, covering conditions important to marine life such as upwelling, acidity (pH), mixed-layer depth, oxygen levels, and plankton distribution.

How it's made. Produced by combining NOAA's seasonal Climate Forecast System with a high-resolution regional ocean model that includes ocean-chemistry and biology, updated monthly.

How & where you'd use it. Helps fisheries managers and coastal communities anticipate ocean conditions affecting marine ecosystems and fishing months in advance.

What's measured

aws-pdsclimatecoastalchemistrymarineoceans

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Watch sea-surface temperature and marine heatwaves
  • Spot algal blooms and ocean-colour shifts
  • Support fisheries and coastal monitoring
Official description

J-SCOPE (JISAO’s Seasonal Coastal Ocean Prediction of the Ecosystem) is funded by NOAA and presented by NANOOS. This project aims to provide experimental seasonal forecasts (six to nine months) of upper ocean properties, based on operational simulations by NOAA's Climate Forecast System (CFS) model, and dynamical downscaling with a high-resolution version of the Regional Ocean Model System (ROMS) that includes a state-of-the-art biogeochemical module. Forecasts of specific oceanic properties crucial to the nearshore and coastal marine ecosystem such as upwelling, pH, mixed layer depth, oxygen concentration and plankton distributions are anticipated with updates on a monthly basis. For more information about the forecast system, please read Siedlecki et al. 2016.The Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS; Rutgers version 3) is configured for the Washington and Oregon coasts after Giddings et al. More information about ROMS can be found here. The Cascadia domain was developed by the Coastal Modeling Group at the UW is roughly 1.5 km in resolution. More information about the model physics can be found here. Our implementation of ROMS includes 17 rivers forced with daily river discharge and temperature data from the USGS gauging stations and an Environment Canada gauging station for the Fraser River as described by Giddings et al. Tides are included. Water entering the domain at the southern and western boundaries is supplied by CFS. Empirical relationships were derived relating nutrients and oxygen to salinity from the observations of Connolly et al (2010) as described by Davis

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).