Sustained, High-Resolution Profiler Observations from the Washington Continental Slope

Since 2014 the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Endurance Array located off the coasts of Oregon and Washington has used moorings, profilers and gliders to collect biological, chemical, and physical data across a range of spatial and temporal scales. This information is provided to the marine research community in near real-time at https://ooinet.oceanobservatories.org. The Washington offshore profiler mooring is located on the continental slope about 65 km west of Westport, WA. First deployed in April 2014, this mooring includes a McLane® Research Laboratories Wire Following Profiler that autonomously samples the water column from 30 m depth down to 500 m, ascending and descending three to four times per day. Traveling at approximately 25 cm/s, the profiler carries low-power instruments that measure physical (temperature, salinity, pressure, and velocity) and biochemical (photosynthetically active radiation, chlorophyll, colored dissolved organic matter fluorescence, optical backscatter, and dissolved oxygen) variables. We will present over five years of observations consisting of more than 11,000 profiles, processed using a newly developed MATLAB® toolbox, that resolve biochemical processes such as carbon export and dissolved oxygen variability in the deep source waters of the Northern California Upwelling System.