Puget Sound Marine Waters 2023 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 2023. The report represents the collective effort of 67 contributors from federal, tribal, state, and local agencies, academia, nonprofits, and private and volunteer groups.
The 2023 Puget Sound Marine Waters Overview report provides a collective view of 2023 Puget Sound marine water quality and conditions and associated biota from comprehensive monitoring and observing programs. The overview covers areas such as climate and weather, river inputs, seawater temperature, salinity, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, ocean acidification, phytoplankton, biotoxins, bacteria and pathogens, marine birds and mammals, pollution, 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. This is the thirteenth 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. 2024. Puget Sound marine waters: 2023 overview. 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).
