During summer 2017, the west coasts of the United States and Vancouver Island, Canada, were surveyed using Lasker during the feeding seasons of sardine and anchovy. The survey departed from San Diego, transited to the northern end of Vancouver Island and sampled southward. Compulsory transects were nearly perpendicular to the coast with nominal separations of 20 nmi in most areas and with nominal separations of 10 nmi in areas where CPS were observed acoustically, in trawl catches, or both. The transect positions also covered much of the potential habitat of sardine at the time of the survey. The survey spanned an area from approximately Cape Scott, British Columbia (northern end of Vancouver Island) to Point Conception, with 105 east-west transects totaling 3540 nmi, and 83 Nordic trawls. Multi-frequency (18, 38, 70, 120, 200, and 333 kHz) General Purpose Transceivers (Simrad EK60 GPTs) and Wideband Transceivers (Simrad EK80 WBTs) were configured with split-beam transducers (Simrad ES18-11, ES38B, ES70-7C, ES120-7C, ES200-7C, and ES333-7C, respectively). The transducers were mounted on the bottom of a retractable keel or “centerboard”. The keel was retracted (transducers ~5-m depth) during calibration, and extended to the intermediate position (transducers ~7-m depth) during the survey. Exceptions were made during shallow water operations, when the keel was retracted; or during times of heavy weather, when the keel was extended (transducers ~9-m depth) to provide extra stability and reduce the effect of weather-generated noise.In addition, acoustic data were also collected using an ME70 multibeam echosounder (Simrad) and MS70 multibeam sonar (Simrad). Final Summer 2017 Survey Report: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/17367 Final Summer 2017 Biomass Report: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/19808

During spring 2017, part of the west coast of the United States was surveyed using Lasker during the principal spawning seasons of sardine and anchovy. Since the central sub-population of anchovy inhabits southern and central California during the spring, the survey began off San Diego and progressed northward toward San Francisco. Transect positions, lengths, and spaces were adjusted according to the expected distribution of anchovy at the time of the survey. Compulsory transects were nearly perpendicular to the coast with nominal separations of 20 nmi; adaptive transects were placed between compulsory transects to reduce nominal separation to 10 nmi when the survey encountered putative CPS backscatter in echograms, high-density eggs in the CUFES (1 or 0.3 eggs min-1 for anchovy or sardine, respectively), or adults in trawls. After initiating adaptive acoustic sampling, the adaptive transect immediately south of the completed compulsory transect was sampled before proceeding northward along the next adaptive and compulsory transects. An adaptive cluster was defined as a minimum of five consecutive transects with 10-nmi spacing. The transect positions also covered much of the potential habitat of sardine at the time of the survey. The survey spanned an area from approximately San Diego to San Francisco, with 27 east-west transects totaling 1828 nmi, and 64 Nordic trawls. Multi-frequency (18, 38, 70, 120, 200, and 333 kHz) General Purpose Transceivers (Simrad EK60 GPTs) and Wideband Transceivers (Simrad EK80 WBTs) were configured with split-beam transducers (Simrad ES18-11, ES38B, ES70-7C, ES120-7C, ES200-7C, and ES333-7C, respectively). The transducers were mounted on the bottom of a retractable keel or “centerboard”. The keel was retracted (~ 5-m depth) during calibration, and extended to the intermediate position (~7-m depth) during the survey. Exceptions were made during shallow water operations, when the keel was retracted to ~ 5-m depth; or during times of heavy weather, when the keel was extended to ~9-m depth to provide extra stability and reduce the effect of weather-generated noise. In addition, acoustic data were also collected using an ME70 multibeam echosounder (Simrad) and MS70 multibeam sonar (Simrad). Final Spring 2017 Survey Report: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/15394 Final Spring 2017 Biomass Report: No biomass report created. The next available biomass report is the Summer 2017 CCE Survey.

2018 Summer California Current Ecosystem CPS Survey (RL1807). In the California Current Ecosystem (CCE), multiple coastal pelagic fish species (CPS), including Pacific sardine (Sardinops sagax), Northern anchovy (Engraulis mordax), jack mackerel (Trachurus symmetricus), Pacific mackerel (Scomber japonicus), and Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), comprise the bulk of the forage fish assemblage. These populations of these species can change by an order of magnitude within a couple years, represent important prey for marine mammals, birds, and larger migratory fishes and are targets of commercial fisheries. Between 26 June and 23 September 2018, an Acoustic-trawl method (ATM) survey was performed to sample the west coast of North America, from the northern tip of Vancouver Island, British Columbia to San Diego, CA to estimate the biomass distributions and abundances of CPS, krill, and their abiotic environments in the CCE. The ATM survey was part of a larger joint survey with the Southwest Fisheries Science Center Marine Mammal and Turtle Division that used line-transect sampling to estimate the abundances, distributions, and demographics of marine mammals and seabirds within the sampling domain. Acoustic sampling and visual observations of marine mammals and seabirds were conducted along 127 east-west acoustic transects totaling 6104 nmi. To estimate the proportions of coastal pelagic species and their lengths, catches were analyzed from 169 trawls. On the NOAA Ship Reuben Lasker, multi-frequency (18, 38, 70, 120, 200, and 333 kHz) EK60 General Purpose Transceivers (GPT, Simrad) and EK80 Wideband Transceivers (WBT, Simrad) were configured with split-beam transducers (Models ES18-11, ES38B, ES70-7C, ES120-7C, ES200-7C, and ES333-7C; Simrad) mounted on the bottom of a retractable keel or “centerboard”. The keel was retracted (transducers ~5-m depth) during calibration, and extended to the intermediate position (transducers ~7-m depth) during the survey. Exceptions were made during shallow water operations, when the keel was retracted; or during times of heavy weather, when the keel was extended (transducers ~9-m depth) to provide extra stability and reduce the effect of weather-generated noise. In addition, acoustic data were also collected using an ME70 multibeam echosounder (Simrad), MS70 multibeam sonar (Simrad), and SX90 omni-directional sonar (Simrad). Transducer position and motion were measured at 5 Hz using an inertial motion unit (POS-MV, Trimble/Applanix). Final 2018 Report: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/19759 Final 2018 Biomass Report: https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/19853

Transit

Data Assimilation

Transit

GP17-OCE

Conditioning SAMW

Transit

Functional diversity