First Coastal Interim Synthesis Workshop

Cyndy Chandler will represent BCO-DMO at the First Coastal Interim Synthesis Workshop in San francisco the weekend prior to the 2010 Fall AGU Meeting.  The Gulf of Mexico synthesis PIs have started to build a CDOM database served by BCO-DMO (http://osprey.bcodmo.org/project.cfm?flag=view&id=29).

Purpose of the Workshop

The contribution of coastal margins to regional and global carbon budgets is not well understood, largely due to limited information about the magnitude, spatial distribution, and interannual variability of carbon sources and sinks in coastal waters. The Ocean Carbon & Biogeochemistry (OCB) Program has been collaborating with the North American Carbon Program (NACP) over the past two years to develop a Coastal Interim Synthesis Activity as part of the NACP Interim Synthesis activities, the goals of which are to bring together relevant observations, data, and modeling efforts in an effort to identify and quantify key sources, sinks, stocks, fluxes, and associated processes in the North American carbon budget.

The objective of the Coastal Interim Synthesis Activity is to stimulate the synthesis of observational and modeling results on carbon cycle fluxes and processes along the North American continental margins. This activity has been divided geographically into five regions: 

• East Coast
  
• West Coast
• Gulf of Mexico
• Arctic
• Great Lakes

The goals of this workshop are to gather active members of the coastal research community to:

• Identify existing datasets, publications and ongoing studies that could contribute to the development of regional coastal carbon budgets (and ultimately archived in a community database)

• Determine the fluxes and processes that should be included in regional carbon budgets and associated models to ensure consistency and inter-comparability

The final outcome of the Coastal Interim Synthesis Activity will be a science plan for coastal ocean carbon and related biogeochemical research that identifies knowledge gaps and ranks research priorities to guide relevant program (e.g., NACP, OCB, etc.) and agency activities and initiatives.  A second workshop is planned for Summer 2011.