- Success Stories
- Environmental Resource Assessment & Management
Expanding Our Offshore Wind Team
We’ve recently added several staff to bolster the offshore wind team at NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science. With this full team of 13, our employee owners are able to provide more focused support in their areas of expertise, including mapping and spatial modeling, data collection, communications, project management, and partner engagement. Through this work, the team develops regional ecosystem-wide spatial models to inform siting of ocean use sectors, environmental review, and permitting, which provides guidance to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) on suitable locations for offshore wind siting.
Sustainable coastal planning and development increases resiliency, creates jobs, reduces reliance on unsustainable imports, supports renewable energy, and grows the domestic Blue Economy. Check out the NCCOS Coastal & Marine Planning and Offshore Wind Energy spatial planning webpages to learn more.
This team is now providing spatial planning support in all U.S. ocean regions and was recently instrumental in BOEM designating two Wind Energy Areas in the Gulf of Mexico. As offshore wind continues to expand throughout U.S. waters, this team will continue to collaborate with BOEM to support the identification of suitable locations for renewable energy. Future work is slated for the U.S. Central Atlantic, Gulf of Maine, Oregon, and more to come!
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Presenting and Networking at Coastal Geotools 2023
The Coastal Geotools conference in Charleston, SC. enables our staff to learn new skills and approaches from their peers, and expand their networks within the geospatial community.
Merit Award Nomination
Congratulations to Steven Brecher, our program manager on our National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) contract. Steven recently served on a validation team, which was responsible for operational testing following a major software installation. The installment is a fully integrated Windows-based database for non-clinical evaluation studies. The validation team’s operational testing helped ensure the database functioned properly prior to…
New Heavily Desired High Resolution Land Cover Data for the U.S.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently announced the launch of the long desired high-resolution coastal land cover data. This highly anticipated data are available for most coastal areas of the U.S., including Alaska and the U.S. territories. CSS employee owners contributed to the release of this data set by participating in production activities and…