Oceanographers are well acquainted with the challenges of working in an undersampled ocean, Observations are often sparse, difficult or expensive to acquire, and may not even be available to the sea-going scientist until they have physically reached their study site by boat. Much is often left to chance if the scientist’s interests lie in the study of episodic events that may be short lived in time and distributed in space. At the other end of the spectrum, scientists studying long-term trends, such as the coastal and estuarine response to global climate change or local human influences, must be able to separate natural variability from anthropogenic effects. This can only be accomplished through the analysis of long-term time series of key parameters obtained from permanent observation stations.

Glenn, S.M., T.D. Dickey, B. Parker, and W. Boicourt. 2000. Long-term real-time coastal ocean observation networks. Oceanography 13(1):24–34, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2000.50.

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