Abstract. Internally consistent, quality-controlled (QC) data products play an
important role in promoting regional-to-global research efforts to
understand societal vulnerabilities to ocean acidification (OA). However,
there are currently no such data products for the coastal ocean, where most
of the OA-susceptible commercial and recreational fisheries and aquaculture
industries are located. In this collaborative effort, we compiled, quality-controlled, and synthesized 2 decades of discrete measurements of
inorganic carbon system parameters, oxygen, and nutrient chemistry data from
the North American continental shelves to generate a data product called
the Coastal Ocean Data Analysis Product in North America (CODAP-NA). There
are few deep-water (> 1500 m) sampling locations in the current
data product. As a result, crossover analyses, which rely on comparisons
between measurements on different cruises in the stable deep ocean, could
not form the basis for cruise-to-cruise adjustments. For this reason, care
was taken in the selection of data sets to include in this initial release
of CODAP-NA, and only data sets from laboratories with known quality
assurance practices were included. New consistency checks and outlier
detections were used to QC the data. Future releases of this CODAP-NA
product will use this core data product as the basis for cruise-to-cruise
comparisons. We worked closely with the investigators who collected and
measured these data during the QC process. This version (v2021) of the
CODAP-NA is comprised of 3391 oceanographic profiles from 61 research
cruises covering all continental shelves of North America, from Alaska to
Mexico in the west and from Canada to the Caribbean in the east. Data for 14
variables (temperature; salinity; dissolved oxygen content; dissolved
inorganic carbon content; total alkalinity; pH on total scale; carbonate
ion content; fugacity of carbon dioxide; and substance contents of silicate,
phosphate, nitrate, nitrite, nitrate plus nitrite, and ammonium) have been
subjected to extensive QC. CODAP-NA is available as a merged data product
(Excel, CSV, MATLAB, and NetCDF; https://doi.org/10.25921/531n-c230,
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/oceans/ncei/ocads/metadata/0219960.html, last access: 15 May 2021)
(Jiang et al., 2021a). The original cruise data have also been updated with
data providers' consent and summarized in a table with links to NOAA's
National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) archives
(https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/ocean-acidification-data-stewardship-oads/synthesis/NAcruises.html).
Charcoal in soils of the Allerød-Younger Dryas transition were the result of natural fires and not necessarily the effect of an extra-terrestrial impact
