SalishCruiseMultistressor_v2025: An updated multi-stressor data product for marine heatwave, hypoxia, and ocean acidification research, including calculated inorganic carbon parameters from the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System from 2008-02-04 to 2024-10-22.

by Simone R. Alin¹, Jan Newton², Richard A. Feely¹, Christopher Ikeda³, Anna Boyar², Dana Greeley¹, Beth Curry², Julian Herndon³ and Alex Kozyr⁴

¹Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Seattle, Washington, USA
²Applied Physics Laboratory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
³Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA
⁴National Centers for Environmental Information, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland, USA

OCADS Project Metadata Page        Database Files (Please see Copyright and Fair Data Use information at the bottom of this page)       

Figure 1 caption

Map of Salish Sea bioregion with elevation and bathymetry, showing all major Salish Sea sub-basins, rivers, and centers of human population. Credit: Sarah Battle, NOAA.

Figure 2 caption

Conceptual diagram illustrating the co-occurring marine stressors in coastal and estuarine ecosystems (warming, hypoxia, and acidification) and their potential influences on other ecological processes such as primary production, respiration, calcification, and dissolution. Credit: Sarah Battle, NOAA.

Abstract

Northeastern Pacific coastal and estuarine ecosystems, such as the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System, are experiencing rapidly changing ocean conditions, including intense heatwaves, increasing hypoxia, and rapid acidification (Figures 1 and 2). High-quality observations are essential for characterizing natural variability in ocean conditions and extreme events, establishing appropriate conditions for biological studies, validating coupled physical-biogeochemical models, and providing context for observed ecosystem impacts. Here we provide a climate-quality data product including measurements of temperature, salinity, nutrients (nitrate, phosphate, silicate, nitrite, and ammonium), and recommended oxygen values in all commonly used units (mg/L, mL/L, and µmol/kg-seawater), along with measured and calculated inorganic system parameters. While the original data package included only directly measured variables (and unit conversions), calculated values are often not archived with measured values for the inorganic carbon system. In this data product, we provide the most commonly used calculated parameters in the marine inorganic carbon system, with the goals of increasing accessibility of this important information about coastal and estuarine stressors and their variability to a broader audience of end users, who may not have expertise in performing inorganic carbon calculations themselves, and facilitating multiple stressor studies in the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System.
This data product includes only the highest quality subset (i.e., with quality control flags of 2) of the (Salish cruise data package ). with complete carbon, oxygen, nutrient, and CTD observations. We used the seacarb package in R (function carb) to calculate the most commonly used derived carbonate system parameters, including pH (on the total scale), partial pressure and fugacity of carbon dioxide at in situ temperatures and pressures (pCO2insitu, and fCO2insitu, respectively), and aragonite and calcite saturation states (OmegaAragonite and OmegaCalcite, respectively; Gattuso et al., 2023). Input parameters from the updated Salish cruise compiled data set (SalishCruiseDataPackage_v2025, Alin et al. 2025a) comprised dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC_UMOL_KG), total alkalinity (TA_UMOL_KG), phosphate (PHOSPHATE_UMOL_KG), and silicate (SILICATE_UMOL_KG) content values from bottle samples analyzed in the laboratory, along with CTD measurements of temperature (CTDTMP_DEG_C_ITS90), salinity (CTDSAL_PSS78), and pressure (CTDPRS_DBAR). Within seacarb, we used the TEOS-10 thermodynamic seawater equations (IOC, SCOR, and IAPSO, 2010). We adopted the total scale for pH (pHT), the Uppstrom (1974) formulation for deriving total boron concentration from salinity, the seacarb default option for Kf (Perez and Fraga, 1987 for temperatures above 9 °C; Dickson and Goyet, 1994 for those below), and the Dickson (Dickson, 1990) option for Ks (following results of Orr et al., 2015). All input content data were first divided by 10^6 to convert from µmol kg–1 to mol kg–1, and pressure (in decibars) was divided by 10 to convert to bar, to conform with the default units of seacarb. For equilibrium constants (K1 and K2), we provide calculated values using both the Lueker et al. (2000) and the Waters et al. (2014) dissociation constants (variable names include “_Lueker” or “_Waters”, respectively). The Lueker constants (for salinity ranges of 19–43 and temperature ranges of 2–35°C) facilitate comparison with publications arising from (West Coast Ocean Acidification (WCOA) cruise data sets), whereas the Waters constants (for salinity ranges of 1–50 and temperature ranges of 0–50°C) allow users working with more brackish salinities to compare their results directly to those in the Salish cruise data product. All references above are included in the seacarb documentation (https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/seacarb.pdf). Alin et al. (2024b) describe the magnitude of differences in calculated values for the Salish cruise data product using the two different sets of dissociation constants.
The SalishCruiseMultistressors_v2025 data product contains 6527 complete records of DIC, TA, T, S, O2, and nutrient measurements. Of this package, all recommended oxygen values have “acceptable” quality flags, as do 6525 CTD temperature and salinity, 6433 TA, 6437 DIC, and 6522 nutrient measurements (see Metadata for details of quality flags used). Including 973 unique oceanographic profiles, the observations in this data product span wide dynamic ranges of temperature (6.0–23.0°C), recommended oxygen concentration (18–612 μmol kg−1, 0.6–19.9 mg/L, 0.4–14.0 mL/L), fCO2 (69–3465 μatm), pHT (7.14–8.59), aragonite saturation state (0.23–3.89), and calcite saturation state (0.37–6.28). The effects of seasonality and extreme events on the geographic extent, the severity, and the duration of occurrence of these multiple marine stressors, as observed during the 2014–2018 seasonal cruise time series, are described in Alin et al. (2024a,b), and a preliminary description of the 2019–2024 cruise observations can be found in Alin et al. (2025b). Sensitivity thresholds for numerous regionally valued species are crossed within the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System (Figure 3 and Alin et al. 2024b Tables 3–4).

Figure 3 caption

Property-property plots reflecting the occurrence of multiple marine stressors in the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current, including all observations in the SalishCruiseMultistressor_v2025 data product. A) Oxygen content in micromoles per kilogram seawater ([O2], µmol/kg) and carbon dioxide fugacity (fCO2, in microatmospheres (µatm), the effective partial pressure of CO2 in water, taking interactions among molecules into account), colored by basin (CO= northern Washington coast, SJDF=Strait of Juan de Fuca, AR=Admiralty Reach, MB=Main Basin, SS=South Sound, WB=Whidbey Basin, and HC=Hood Canal). The horizontal dashed green line represents a hypoxia threshold ([O2] = 62 µmol/kg = 2.0 mg/L = 1.4 mL/L), to which many marine organisms—including Dungeness crab—are sensitive. The vertical dashed green line represents a hypercapnia threshold used in the literature (fCO2 = 1000 µatm) for the metabolic sensitivity of some marine species to high CO2 conditions. B) Temperature (degrees Celsius, °C) and aragonite saturation state (Ωarag), colored by depth. The dashed yellow lines represent pteropod (Limacina helicina) sensitivity ranges to thermal stress (vertical) and corrosive Ωarag (horizontal) levels from Bednaršek et al. (2018, 2019), and the vertical navy line represents a temperature sensitivity threshold for Dungeness crab from Berger et al. (2021 and references therein). C) pH on the total scale (pHT) and calcite saturation state (Ωcalc), colored by the month when the cruise occurred.

The dashed vertical line represents a sensitivity threshold for Dungeness crab to pHT used in Berger et al. (2021 and references therein), and the horizontal line represents the thermodynamic saturation threshold for calcite (Ωcalc = 1), below which calcite may dissolve. Dungeness crab h have calcite in their exoskeletons at multiple life stages, and Bednaršek et al. (2022) documented exoskeleton dissolution in U.S. West Coast waters in Dungeness crab megalopae that appeared to be related to Ωcalc levels.

The SalishCruiseMultistressors_v2025 data product and metadata are available on the Index page accessed by clicking the Database Files link above the map:
Data—Filename “SalishCruiseMultistressors_v2025_data_07252025.csv” includes all complete CTD, carbon, nutrient, and oxygen samples along with calculated carbonate system parameters.
Metadata—Filename “SalishCruiseDataPackage_v2025_metadata_07252025.xlsx” includes detailed methods information for all measurements included in this data package. Changes made to data quality flags for 2008–2024 data since the previous version of the data package can be found in the SalishCruiseDataPackage_v2025 metadata file.

Please cite this data product as:
Alin, Simone R.; Newton, Jan; Feely, Richard A.; Ikeda, Christopher; Boyar, Anna; Greeley, Dana; Herndon, Julian; Kozyr, Alex (2025). SalishCruiseMultistressor_v2025: An updated multi-stressor data product for marine heatwave, hypoxia, and ocean acidification research, including calculated inorganic carbon parameters from the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System from 2008-02-04 to 2024-10-22 (NCEI Accession 0307626). [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25921/4y18-rw26. Accessed [date].

For archival purposes, the data and metadata files that the Alin et al. (2024b) publication was based on can be accessed here:
Metadata — https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/oceans/ncei/ocads/metadata/0283266.html
Data — https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/data/oceans/ncei/ocads/data/0283266/

Related data product:

Alin, Simone R.; Newton, Jan; Ikeda, Christopher; Boyar, Anna; Greeley, Dana; Herndon, Julian; Curry, Beth; Kozyr, Alex; Feely, Richard A. (2025). SalishCruiseDataPackage_v2025: An updated compiled data package of sensor profile and discrete physical and biogeochemical measurements from 61 individual cruise data sets collected from a variety of ships in the southern Salish Sea and northern California Current System (Washington state marine waters) from 2008-02-04 to 2024-10-22 (NCEI Accession 0307188). [indicate subset used]. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.25921/jgrz-v584. Accessed [date].

Publications

Alin, S.R., J.A. Newton, R.A. Feely, B. Curry, D. Greeley, J. Herndon, and M. Warner (2024a). A decade-long cruise time-series (2008–2018) of physical and biogeochemical conditions in the southern Salish Sea, North America. Earth System Science Data, 16, 837–865, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-16-837-2024

Alin, S.R., J.A. Newton, R.A. Feely, S. Siedlecki, and D. Greeley (2024b). Seasonality and response of ocean acidification and hypoxia to major environmental anomalies in the southern Salish Sea, North America (2014–2018). Biogeosciences, 21, 1639–1673, https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-21-1639-2024

Alin, S.R., Newton, J., Feely, R.A., Boyar, A., and Ikeda, C. (2025b). The second half decade of Washington Ocean Acidification Center cruises PSEMP Marine Waters Workgroup. In J. Apple, R. Wold, K. Stark, J. Bos, S. Yang, J. Selleck, N. Burnett, A. Marquez, L. Loehr, J. Rice, S. Kantor, C. Krembs. and J. Newton (Eds). Puget Sound marine waters: 2024 overview. https://www.psp.wa.gov/psmarinewatersoverview.php

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge that the land our laboratories are located on has been the home of Coast Salish people since time immemorial and that our study area encompasses the traditional and ancestral waters of the Coast Salish peoples and the Coastal Treaty Tribes of Washington. The creation of this data product was supported by the Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, and NOAA’s Ocean Acidification Program (Multi-stressor Project) along with all the organizations that supported the collection of the data included in the Salish cruise data product. This is PMEL contribution number 5557. This publication is partially funded by the Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean, and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) under NOAA Cooperative Agreement NA20OAR4320271, Contribution No. 2025-1472.

COPYRIGHT AND FAIR DATA USE

Copyright — These data were produced by NOAA and the Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC) and are not subject to copyright protection in the United States. NOAA and WOAC waive any potential copyright and related rights in these data worldwide through the Creative Commons Zero 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication (CC0-1.0).

Fair Data Use request from data producers — Data from the Salish cruises are made freely available to the public and the scientific community in the belief that their wide dissemination will lead to greater understanding and new scientific and policy insights. The investigators sharing these data rely on the ethics and integrity of the user to ensure that the institutions and investigators involved in producing the Salish cruise data sets receive fair credit for their work, which in turn helps ensure the continuity of the observational time-series. If the data are obtained for potential use in a publication or presentation, we urge the end user to inform the investigators at the outset of this work so that we can help ensure that the quality and limitations of the data are accurately represented. If these data are essential to the work, or if an important result or conclusion depends on these data, co-authorship may be appropriate; this should be discussed at an early stage in the work. We request that manuscripts using these data be shared before they are submitted for publication. Please direct all queries about this data set to Dr. Simone Alin (simone.r.alin@noaa.gov) and Dr. Jan Newton (janewton@uw.edu).