Puget Sound Marine Waters 2022 Overview

Each year, the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program releases the annual Puget Sound Marine Waters Overview report. The latest report combines a wealth of data from comprehensive monitoring programs and provides a concise summary of what was happening in Puget Sound’s marine waters during 2022. The report represents the collective effort of 84 contributors from federal, tribal, state, and local agencies, academia, nonprofits, and private and volunteer groups.

Image of a sailboat on the water at sunset.Text overlay reads: Puget Sound Marind Waters 2022 Overview.
Report cover

The 2022 Puget Sound Marine Waters Overview report provides a collective view of marine water conditions in Puget Sound for 2022, enhancing our understanding of this complex ecosystem that is an economic lifeline for Western Washington. It covers areas such as climate and weather, river inputs, seawater temperature, salinity, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, ocean acidification, phytoplankton, biotoxins, bacteria and pathogens, shellfish resources, and more. While the report focuses on the marine waters of greater Puget Sound, additional selected conditions are also included due to their influence on Puget Sound waters. These include large-scale climate indices and conditions along the Washington coast. It is important to document and understand regional drivers of variability and patterns on various timescales so that water quality data may be interpreted with these variations in mind, to better attribute human effects versus natural variations and change. The 2022 Overview is the twelfth annual report on marine water conditions in Puget Sound since 2011. The report is produced by the Puget Sound Ecosystem Monitoring Program’s Marine Waters Workgroup with support from the University of Washington Puget Sound Institute.

Citation

PSEMP Marine Waters Workgroup. 2023. Puget Sound marine waters: 2022 overview., J. Apple, R. Wold, K. Stark, J. Bos, S. Yang, J. Selleck, N. Burnett, F. Perez, G. Ferrara, A. Marquez, S. K. Moore, S. Kantor, C. Krembs, G. Hannach, and J. Newton (Eds).

View the full report