The past two decades have seen the development of large multidisciplinary oceanographic programs that focus on understanding carbon cycling processes in coastal and oceanic environments. Synthesis and modeling activities typically followed toward the ends of these programs (e.g., Joint Global Ocean Flux Study), usually long after the field experiments had been planned and carried out. A lesson from these programs was articulated in subsequent community planning reports (e.g., the Ocean Carbon Transport, Exchanges and Transformations Report [OCTET; http://www.msrc.sunysb.edu/octet/Workshop_Report.htm] and Ocean Carbon and Climate Change Report [OCCC; http://www.carboncyclescience.gov/documents/occc_is_2004.pdf]): future ocean carbon cycle research programs should promote close collaborations among scientists with expertise in measurement, data analysis, and numerical modeling at every stage of development—formative stages of hypothesis building, planning and execution of field programs, data analysis, numerical modeling, and synthesis.

The USECoS Team. 2008. Eastern US continental shelf carbon budget: Integrating models, data assimilation, and analysis. Oceanography 21(1):86–104, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2008.70.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.