2007 Hypoxia Watch Bottom CTD Station Locations

This environmental data complements the main objective of the four week SEAMAP cruise, which is to survey stocks of commercially important fish in the Gulf of Mexico. The Southeast Area Monitoring and Assessment Program (SEAMAP) is a cooperative State, Federal, and university program that collects, manages and disseminates fishery-independent data and information in the southeastern United States. The effort is part of the SEAMAP summer groundfish survey conducted in the Gulf of Mexico by the National Marine Fisheries Service aboard the NOAA Ship Oregon II. The survey follows a predetermined stratified random survey design to sample fishes and invertebrates in trawls, bongo and neuston nets, and acquire environmental data with conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) hydrocasts at stations located in the general area between the 10 and 200 m isobaths from Brownsville, Texas eastward to the Mississippi River. The CTD is equipped with sensors to measure water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, fluorescence, and transmittance continuously from the surface to the sea bottom. Approximately 240 stations are sampled during the cruise, which is divided into up to three legs of varying lengths during June and July, depending on weather and equipment. The bottom oxygen maps are produced approximately weekly during the six week survey cruise. The actual CTD data from which these maps are derived is available from NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service Mississippi Laboratory in Pascagoula after the R/V Oregon II returns to port. The Hypoxia Watch process was developed by the NOAA CoastWatch Gulf of Mexico Regional Node at Stennis Space Center. CoastWatch provides satellite imagery and other environmental data to government decision makers and academic researchers. The Gulf of Mexico Regional Node is one of several sites throughout the United States set up for the processing and distribution of CoastWatch information. One area of current research is to see if imagery taken from satellites and aircraft can be useful in analyzing and predicting hypoxic conditions. Although remotely sensed imagery cannot directly measure dissolved oxygen levels in the ocean, it can measure other things that contribute to the formation of hypoxic waters, such as sea surface temperature and chlorophyll.