Well, thank you. Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Kelly Askvig. I'm a Senior Program Officer for the Ocean Studies Board at the National Academies, and I'm the study director for this study. Let's see. I think we can do next slide. Okay, so for virtual meeting participants, the logistics here are to meet yourself when you're not speaking. We had a few more sound issues there and to use the raise hand function for Q&A in the Zoom to ask questions. And we ask everyone to have your camera on when you are speaking and kind of support an inclusive community with those of us, those that are joining us remotely. Next slide. Let's see. Okay. So for those of you that are not familiar with the National Academies or our processes, I'll give you a one minute overview. So we're a private nonprofit institutions that provide independent objective analysis and advice to the US to solve complex problems and inform public policy and decisions related to science, technology and medicine. We are first established by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Today is the second meeting of the Committee on the Evaluation of Hydrodynamic Modeling and Implications for Offshore Wind Development for Nantucket-Scholls Region. This work is sponsored by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, referred to as BOEM. And we've assembled a committee of nine volunteers who were chosen for their expertise and experience, and they serve pro bono to carry out the study's statement of task, which you'll hear more about in a few minutes. Next slide. And to accomplish this work, the committee will hold four meetings for the purposes of public information gathering like today, deliberation, report writing and response to our peer review. The result of all this work will be a peer reviewed report representing the consensus view of the committee. The report is expected to be released into the public in the fall of 2023. Next slide, please. And next slide. We do have a public project website that includes information about past and upcoming events, and I will post a link to the website in the chat in just a minute. Next slide, please. And so before we begin, we want to have a brief safety moment. This is easy for the people that are joining us in person. This is the first floor of the Keck building. So if there is an emergency, you exit exactly the way that you came in. So just go down this hallway, take a right. And then our meeting place is in the, in the lawn of the building museum across the street, and you'll see masses hurting that way. And then also if you need to use restroom, that's on your way as well. So just take a right down the hall and there's a ladies and men's room. And next slide, please. So hybrid meeting logistics again so this is a true hybrid meeting. Many people are here with us today in DC, and several people are joining us remotely from wherever they happen to be. So, in order to promote an inclusive environment we are asking everyone in the, in the DC office to turn on their zooms and use their camera when they're speaking. Turn off your audio when you're not speaking. The folks in the room, you need to make sure your computer audio is off, which I think we've got we've got down now. And then virtual participants, you know, we ask that you also meet yourself when you're not speaking. And all participants please just use the raise hand function again like I said earlier. And I think that's all I have. Yeah, let's jump into the meeting so I'll introduce our committee chair now sitting next to me, Dr Eileen Hoffman. She is a professor and eminent scholar in the Department of Ocean and Earth Sciences and a member of the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, both both at Old Dominion University, her research interests are in the areas of physical biological interactions and marine ecosystems environmental control and transmission of marine diseases and descriptive physical oceanography. Eileen has served on several committees at the National Academies, and we are very pleased to have her leading the study. The floor is yours Eileen. Okay, that works. All right, so we're all lined up here. So anyway, thank you Kelly. And it is definitely my pleasure to welcome everyone here and thank you for making the time and effort to be here. This is an important committee, and the task of this committee is shown here on the slide. So the objective of the study is to understand the potential effects of offshore fixed bottom wind turbine generators on marine hydrodynamics, and the resulting impacts on marine mammals, specifically the North Atlantic right whale prey. The three focus areas for the committee are shown on this slide here. I'm not going to read them to you. You can you can look at them and they're available on the website that Kelly mentioned earlier. So I hope everyone had an opportunity to look at the agenda for the meeting. So this this meeting is structured to provide inputs to the three focus areas shown on the slide here. And what we're going to do we're going to start with the current state of understanding of hydrodynamics and prey resources in the Nantucket Shoals region. We're going to get inputs and lessons from our European colleagues about their experiences with offshore wind energy development. Next we'll have an overview of the models that are used to simulate hydrodynamic conditions and and look at the effects of turbines on the wind field, and then we'll end with a perspective from our industry partners. We have a real packed agenda to get through today. And so we'll go ahead and get started. But before we do that I'd like to have the committee members and the invited speakers for today, introduce themselves as well as our sponsors and I think I'll start with the people on the zoom zoom here and if I can do that. Should I turn my camera up to do this. Yeah. Okay, so what I'm going to yeah there we go. I can see all right so what I'm going to do is ask the people on zoom to please introduce yourself. First and then we'll introduce the people sitting in the in the room here. All right, so if we start here. All right, I'll just look at people on my screen here. Ariana Zampolo, please, which if you briefly introduce yourself, and I'm just going to ask you to say your name your affiliation and maybe less than one sentence about your expertise. Okay, because we have a lot of introductions to get through it. Okay. Yes. So hi everyone. I'm Ariana Zampolo, I am from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland in the UK. I represent Professor Bettscott Group. And I did my PhD in like investigating the effect of offshore wind farms on primary production in the Scottish South London. Thank you. I think Goren, Goren Braustrom. Yes. Hello. Thank you for inviting me. My name is Geron Braustrom. I'm a professor in physical oceanography at the Department of Marine Science in the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I do work on wind. I have worked a little bit on wind farm and that is my great appalling. Otherwise I work with the natural dynamics and also surface waves is something some of my interest. Thank you. Jeff Runge. Hi, I'm Jeffrey Runge. I am a professor in school marine sciences at the University of Maine. I guess my research specialty is in zooplankton ecology. I've worked with the Fisheries and Oceans Canada for many years in the Quebec region and before coming to the University of Maine. And I've spent a lot of my career studying the dinette population dynamics of copepods, especially callinous species. And I'm presently a science advisor for the NIRICU's integrated Sentinel Monitoring Network time series stations, which I'll report on later today. Thank you. Nick record, please. Hi, everyone. I'm Nick record. I'm a senior scientist at Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, which is up in Maine. I direct the Tandy Center for Ocean Forecasting there and I'm an ecosystem modeler. Mainly, I do work on a wide variety of things, including right whales, their prey, and underlying physics. And I'm also a member of the Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team at NOAA convenes, or the Fisheries Service convenes. Hey, thank you. Let's see who's here. Tom Kilpatrick, please. Yeah, I'm not on the panel, but I'm on the committee. I work at BOME. I'm my background's in physical oceanography, satellite, working with satellites and with models. Thanks. Thank you. Let's see, Ute Dewey. Hi, I'm Ute Dewey. I am from the Hamilton Center on Herion in Germany. I'm working in marine ecosystem modeling on all kinds of problems, lower traffic levels, but also higher traffic levels and level fish drift. And lately I've been working quite a bit on human use impacts on customer marine ecosystems and among others also offshore wind developments and how they affect the physics and the ecosystems in the European waters and I will present that later today. Hey, thank you. York. Yeah. You're here. Oh, you're here. Oh, sorry. I'm, I'm getting confused here with names. So. Oh, hey, Peters is here as well. Yep. Okay. So I think we've hit everybody on zoom, I think. Have I missed anyone? Okay, then I think we'll start here. And will we start at the end of the table over there? Okay, so introduce yourself and go around. First of all, so my name is Jeff Carpenter. I'm a physical oceanographer from the Helmholtz Center, Herion in Germany, and I specialize in smaller scale ocean physics and especially turbulence. Hi, everyone. Good morning. And my name is your book. I'm a senior researcher at Delteris and team lead of our offshore engineering and marketing. And my own primary expertise is on local hydromorpho dynamics mainly related to scour sky protection. Good morning. I'm Jim Chen from Northeastern University in Boston. I'm a professor of civil environmental engineering doing coastal modeling in general. Good morning, Seth Kaplan. Good morning. Turn on my video. Seth Kaplan, director of government regulatory affairs at Ocean Winds with which Ariana will recognize as the folks with the projects in the Firtham Array in Scotland. And I previously was at Conservation Law Foundation for almost 20 years and now with Ocean Winds, which is a offshore wind developer working on both coasts the United States and many places around the world. My name is Seth Kaplan. I come from Northeastern Massachusetts. So I have been working on the offshore wind funds in 2014 for the BOUN. We'll find you the project. We have a Northeastern forecast system operation for US Coast Guard. So we also get a NOVA supporting working on offshore wind farm modeling. I'm from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and I'm a physical oceanographer. Welcome. I'm Mary Bultman. I'm with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. I'm also the contracting officer's representative of government ease for this particular effort. And I want to say thank you a huge thank you to all of you for your time and your effort and your energy in this. I know it's fast paced. And we're asking a lot and I appreciate that you're all doing this voluntarily. And that's it. Thank you. I'll keep going. Brian Hooker also with BOUM and Echo Mary's. Thanks for being here. Hi, I'm Julia Singer. I am a marine scientist with Oceana who works on North Atlantic right wheels. Hi, I'm Jackie Schaff. I'm a canals fellow at the Marine Mammal Commission. So just here observing today. My name is Emily Hildreth and I'm with the policy group in BOUM's Office of Renewable Energy Programs as an observer. Thanks. Hi, my name is Erin Joberty. I'm a physical oceanographer and meteorologist and I'm with the environmental consulting firm AKRF. Hi, I'm Erin Meyer-Gutbrod. I'm from the University of South Carolina. And I research the impacts of changes in pre-availability on right wheel demography and distribution. Hello, everyone. Laura Morse with Invenergy. I'll be speaking toward the end of the session and developer session. My background is in ocean acoustics and physical oceanography. Most recently I've been working on effects of floating offshore wind and upwelling circulation in California. Good morning, everyone. Josh Kohut with Rutgers University. I'm a physical oceanographer and my research is really applying ocean observing technologies and models to understand dynamic habitats of different species. I'm Richard Merrick and I, by training, I'm a biological oceanographer. I just, I retired in 2017 from NOAA Fisheries as the chief scientist, which are there here in DC for five years. But prior to that, and one of the reasons I moved to Woods Hole from Alaska was to deal with right wheels. So for the last, since 1997, I've been working with North Atlantic right wheels. I'm also on the large whale take reduction team, which is really focusing on right wells. And I'm co-chair of the scientific review group, which is the MMPA acquired body that reviews all marine animal stock assessments on this coast. Right wells have been a major focus of that group, but other species that are affected by wind farm are also of interest. Thanks. Hi, I'm Tom Johnson. I'm Chief Operations Officer for the Americas for DHI Water and Environment. I'm the project manager for the ongoing project for BOEM, looking at looking at the cumulative impacts of offshore wind farms from North Carolina, South Carolina border up to New York Bight area. And I was also the project manager on the previous study, which was focused on the Massachusetts Rhode Island area. We did the hydrodynamics and then also looked at impacts on sea scallops, silver hake and summer flounder. And we're continuing that kind of work with this new study. My name is Ole Svendster Petersen. My name is Ole Svendster Petersen. I come from DHI or Danish hydraulic institute. It was in the old days. I'm principal engineer in the ocean department. And I've been working with offshore wind for the last many, many 20 years. So mainly as a modeler, development of models and application of models. And I'm also a scientist on the project that we work from for BOEM that Tom is leading. Thanks. Good morning. I'm Doug Noecek. I'm a professor at Duke University in the School of the Environment and the Engineering School. I also lead the Wildlife and Offshore Wind project that's supported by DOE and BOEM that's focused on the potential impacts of offshore wind development on marine mammals, sea birds and bats. And my area of study is bioacoustics and behavioral ecology of mostly large whales, but certainly spent a lot of time with North Atlantic right whales. Good morning. I'm Kristina Archer. I'm a professor at the University of Delaware in the departments of geography and special sciences and mechanical engineering. I'm also the director of the Center for Research in Wind. And I'm here to talk about wakes in the atmosphere from wind farms. Okay, I think that's everyone. Have we missed anyone on Zoom or any here? Okay, so thank you all again for making the time to be here and for your contributions to this fact-finding activity by the committee. I think we'll go ahead and get started with our agenda, jump right into it. And the first presentation we have today will be from Glenn Goarkowitz, who is a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic. He's an expert in coastal oceanography, particularly with frontal dynamics and observations and modeling of shelf-break fronts. And so Glenn is going to talk to us about the oceanography in the Nantucket Shoals. So please. Thank you, Eileen. Thank you, Eileen. I need to re-mute myself. Okay, so let's see. And then do I hit share screen on the... Should I run my own? Okay. Let's see. And where's the share screen button? She'll speak. Okay, thank you. Good. Okay. Well, thank you for the invitation. And I'll be talking about the oceanography around Nantucket Shoals, pretty much the circulation around New England, basically. And the outline of the talk is as follows. I'll just give a quick introduction to the regional circulation. Let's see. Is the PowerPoint going to the people on Zoom? Okay, good. Then I'll talk about one of the biggest impacts, which is ocean warming in the region and marine heat waves. And I think relative to the potential prey distributions, the biggest impact is changes in the stratification. And the stratification is getting very, very complex because of an increase in Gulfstream variability. And we'll also talk about a very important physical process, mid-depth salinity maximum intrusions that is very much affecting the stratification and also bringing species from offshore. Then finally, I'd like to talk about something that was very, very disconcerting in 2021. The research is really focused on shelf break processes. And we saw a massive displacement of the shelf break front, more than 50 kilometers offshore that lasted for more than five months. And it drastically affected the ecosystem as I'll talk about in a minute. I work very closely with the commercial fishing industry in southern New England and heard about all sorts of impacts there, but it's something that I'm not sure has been fully appreciated. This is the larger scale circulation. I'll zoom into Nantucket Shoals in the next slide. And this is a figure on the left from Paula Fratt and Tony. And there's really two major current systems that are in the region. The Gulfstream, their Western boundary current, very large, huge transport, important in the global transport of heat there. Another really important current system is the shelf break jet that runs along the edge of the continental shelf. And you can trace that all the way back up to the Labrador Sea. It's a continuous feature there. And on the right-hand side is a climatology that my old student, Chris Linder, put together. That's 100 years worth of data averaged in the cross shelf there. And the front is normally positioned with its foot where it intersects the bottom around the 100 meter ice abat south of New England. And typical temperature differences are four to six degrees centigrade there. And in the lower panel, you can see that the mean salinity field. And by the way, that's in the summertime. That's why you see the thermocline there. But typical salinity differences were 2.0. But as we'll see, that gradient has increased dramatically in the last 20 years. If we zoom into the area around Nantucket Shoals, this is the upstream circulation here. And back here around 2006, 2007, when we had a sparkly brand new Remus 100 autonomous underwater vehicle, we did a bunch of surveys, and actually mapped out the outer Cape Coastal Current that runs down past Chatham there. And then just north of Nantucket Shoals, the flow bifurcates there with one branch heading across the northern edge of George's Bank, and another branch heading down the western portion of the Great South Channel there. And that coastal current has a typical velocity of 20 to 30 centimeters a second there. It's an important pathway. And I can't resist mentioning Chen's work back for the Scopex experiment, the northern edge of Great South Channel there in the late 1980s, I believe, that certainly had a big influence on how I look at the region. And by the way, in the lower right, that photo shows how much we had to learn about launch and recovery of autonomous underwater vehicles. I did regrettably show that figure once to a room full of Navy SEALs, and I was worried that they injured themselves laughing, actually. Okay, so my entire career can basically be encapsulated in this one cartoon. I'm always careful not to delete it there. But shelf break processes are very complex. One of the important things is that there's a persistent upwelling at the shelf break. And that occurs even in the absence of wind forcing. It's really due to bottom boundary layer convergence and typical upwelling rates are between 10 and 20 meters a day there. The upwelling feeds right into the center of the shelf break jet. You can see the ice attacks, the U shaped things near the surface. The jet itself is normally about 50 meters thick there. And the jet is frequently affected by warm core rings, immediately offshore the warm core rings have typical vertical scales of 500 to 1000 meters so they don't get on to the continental shelf. But I'll show you how they are really affecting the stratification recently. I'll be talking a little bit later about the mid depth salinity maximum intrusions that go in center typically at a depth of about 20 meters during the stratified season. And hopefully I convinced can convince you that these processes have been changing quite a bit in terms of frequency and intensity. I won't be talking about it today but we're also getting significant bottom intrusions. That are linked to wind forcing those can go 100 kilometers across the continental shelf there and get all the way up to Block Island south of New England. Okay, two things have really shaped how I look at the recent oceanographic changes in the region. This was the National Science Foundation Ocean observatories initiative pioneer array that was out between 2015 and 2022. That was a process oriented shelf break observatory it involved gliders, seven different mooring sites and and periodic autonomous underwater vehicle surveys there I actually led the team that designed the observatory although it was not a part of any of the operations there, but that has really really shaped how I see the changing nature of the shelf break processes. And as a direct result of the public hearings about the pioneer array and the permitting process I was put into very close contact with the commercial fishing industry. So we were able to convince them that this was a worthwhile endeavor, and we ended up actually forming a shelf research fleet where fishing vessels collect temperature and salinity profile since 2014. As of last week, fishing vessels had collected 818 profiles. This is particularly important during the pandemic when you know those vessels were not out sampling there. One of the most important aspects of this interaction has been twice a year meetings and there's a photograph in the lower right I go in and talk about the oceanographic conditions and then hear from the fishers about what the actual fishing conditions have been. So I get practically up to the minute reports on what's going on with the different catches. Okay, so ocean warming, the time that that it really really hit me right on the face was it was in a cruise in May of 2012 and we were doing some work just north of Cape Hatteras. And there was no temperature gradient across the shelf break front it should have been five degrees C we had a five degree C warm anomaly. And I said something weird is going on here we were looking for a specific fish, a butter fish and blue fish for a program on fish school scattering and they weren't there at all. It was only warm water fish that we were seeing so I got back I had a postdoc who had just arrived at Woods Hall I said, let's look into this. This is a figure he made of the mean temperature anomalies for March of 2012. There, there was a maximum anomaly of six degrees centigrade and as you can see it was warm over the whole area. So I figured out that the jet stream did not bring cold air down in the fall until six weeks later. And so heat loss from the ocean was 50% less than usual that winter, which led directly to six months temperature anomalies in the Gulf of Long Island 2.6 and Chesapeake Baymouth 2.6. And again, when we were out in May it was a five degree C warm anomaly and this was the first time it really hit me in the face. How extensive these warming processes really were. An important topic in recent years, particularly from marine ecology is marine heat waves and briefly that's when you have temperature anomalies that are in the 90th percentile or above that lasts more than five days there. And there was a nice paper by Hendrik Grosse Lindemann, an undergraduate from Germany and his supervisor Sven Jirain at Woods Hall. On the left hand panel shows the warming rates from the optimally interpolated SST fields from NOAA there. I just want to draw your attention to how the continental slope is has the highest warming rates there, along with the axis of the Gulf Stream coming out at Cape Hatteras there. And I'll return to that the changes in that upper slope, quite a bit there. On the left side in the upper panel there is the number of days per year within marine heat wave conditions over the continental shelf south of New England. And that largest value there is actually 2012, but 2016 is the next peak over to the right. This starts in 1982 and you can see from about 1982 to 2000 the marine heat waves are very intermittent, but since about 2010 they've really increased and I just want to point out there was a wonderful paper about two years ago by a Fonso Neto and her advisor Jamie Poulter on how the Labrador seawater is not getting around the tail of the Grand Banks as effectively and that's led to a lot of warming. That's an important paper Neto at all. I think it was 2021. Okay. Now, for the purposes of this committee, I think stratification is very important. And I've been working with the Sea Education Association for many years I was actually the science coordinator for the joint program orientation cruises. So it's fun doing oceanography with a sailing vessel. And so when the students come into the program, they go out for anywhere from seven to nine days. So, we ended up doing a U shaped pattern right at the shelf break south of New England there. And, and this is results over 11 years. And this was a paper that Ben Harden led an SCA scientist on the left hand side is the the means on the right hand side of the panels. There on the left are the standard deviations. I just want to focus on the changes in the density. And so in the two panels on the right hand side, that red area arrow on the top left points to the near surface and over those 11 years. The arrow on the right hand side shows the trend linear trend there. The surface density, potential density is decreasing by point one to kilograms per meter cube per year, which I think it is pretty amazing. And at about 50 meters depth the rate is about half of that and then down at 150 meters it's about an order of magnitude down from the surface but that that is really a very high rate. And then I mentioned the pioneer array earlier that's been really, really important because it's had continuous time series there over seven years and I have a PhD student Lucas Loeber who's working closely with that to look at high wind events. But he made a nice plot for me on the right hand side of the surface density and the density at 69 meters depth within the last several years. And you can see in the red there with the surface potential density in 2020 there it got as low as about 21.4 Sigma theta there. And you can see the enormous spread in that August September time period in terms of the minimum surface density there. There's just enormous inter-annual variability there. And to give some idea of the complexity of the stratification I was out on a cruise in September of 2022. We were looking at those salinity maximum intrusions in the lower left are a number of the vertical profiles of density and on the right hand side is buoyancy frequency and you can see how complex that N squared is right there. And as we'll see next, it's the influence of the offshore forcing that is really making the stratification very complex. So, in thinking about models, and I'll have three different thoughts on challenges there are. Can the models accurately describe the inter-annual variations in the peak stratification because these are large these are one and a half to two Sigma theta there from year to year. Can they capture the seasonal evolution of the stratification and can they produce something like the trend in that decrease in surface density and and again I think the last two years in particular 2021 and 2022. So it's been particularly buoyant there at the surface. Okay, so I've alluded to the Gulf Stream and it's importance on the on the continental shelf and it's something that that really has surprised me over the last, last several years so in 2013 we had a workshop that included members of the commercial fishing industry. This was really a follow on to the multi use conflict negotiations over the pioneer array. And we heard from Fred Matera, who's who's a legendary Rhode Island fisherman. He had a list of 10 observations that the fishing community just wanted to hear about from oceanographers and why it was happening. Number one was more Gulf Stream water on the continental shelf. We didn't heard this from anybody, you know this was the first time we heard it. We took that to heart. And three years later my colleague Magdalena Andrews looking at sea surface height anomaly fields. There are incredible differences between the mid 1990s and 2014 in particular. And you can see in the panels on the left is the envelope of the 25 centimeter anomaly field there and you can see that the Gulf Stream was relatively straight in 1995 but by 2015, you can see that the meanders are much larger amplitude they're getting much closer to the edge of the continental shelf there. And, and so the character has really changed the Gulf Stream is more unstable. I should add that that, I don't know if it's ironically or not but the jet stream has also changed in the same manner and Jennifer Francis's work has been, you know very different in how Arctic warming of the atmosphere is affecting mid latitude weather. So, my colleague of Egypt gong up and I had a master student back in 2017 I knew about Magdalena's work there, and he did a lot of warm core rings using the Jennifer Clark charts and a vision and his group found that the number of warm core rings generated by the Gulf Stream nearly doubled in the year 2000 there it went from any kinetic energy. Okay, now why should we care about that if we're worried about the continental shelf and about pray fields and about right whales. Turns out that there's a process that's been known about since the 1930s bigelow and in his classic book on the Gulf of Maine actually talked about these profiles with a salinity maximum at mid depth there. There was a very nice paper with a climatology of these intrusions in 2003 by my colleague Steve lens, and he came up with a nice classification system to define these intrusions. Now they had not been mapped before so everybody just has scattered profiles with these in them. They're pretty pronounced when you come across them there. And so, at the start of the pandemic in those blissful days before people discovered zoom, I was holed up in my daughter's bedroom and got to go through 619 profiles one by one to characterize these intrusions in the shelf fleet data there. I should add one immediate difference right off the bat was that I had to use a delta s of 0.2 PSU as opposed to lenses 0.1 because there were so many intrusions in the profile with 0.1 I would have gone crazy. So one of the first things that jumped out. This is the location of profiles with the intrusions here. And the sort of blueish green are profiles with intrusions and the black dots are profiles with no intrusions. They are all the way up north of 41 degrees north. They are more than 100 kilometers inshore of the shelf break. And in the lens climatology, they rarely got more than 30 kilometers inshore of the shelf break there. The intrusions are getting all the way to the title mixing front around Nantucket Shoals and I had one particular profile I'll never forget in August of 2018 we had a 10 meter thick layer practically on the beach at Martha's Vineyard of 36.0 PSU there. Unfortunately the ship's engine exploded so I wasn't able to map the feature which is one of my regrets but that's field work. Now a direct consequence for the prey fields as these intrusions come in 10% of the profiles from the shelf fleet from the time period 2015 to 2019 had multiple intrusions and this was the profile with a maximum number of intrusions. There's four of them above that 0.2 threshold there. And I regret that I don't have a screenshot from a Simrad EK80 acoustic backscatter system but I've been out on cruises with the Neil Armstrong where you can see that the zooplankton are in the different layers there. We had multiple layers that was a cruise. Gareth Lawson is chief scientist in June of 2016 there but I believe that when you get these intrusions with the multiple layers there it's definitely affecting the distribution of the prey fields there and again possibly reducing the concentration in an individual layer. And remember I'm a physical oceanographer not a biologist so take what I say with some grain of salt. So now, how are these processes changing in frequency. This was one of the most surprising things. I was looking at the frequency in terms of percentage of profiles that had salinity maximum intrusion in them from the shelf fleet. And it turned out it's about 70% more frequent relative to the lens numbers. They only occur during the stratified season you need to have the thermocline picnic line there for them to come but in August and September it's nearly 50% of the time you're seeing these intrusions and so there is just an incredible interplay between the continental slope water masses, which frequently are affected by rings and the continental shelf. In the past, it was a pretty much a uniform water mass there was one nice sharp peak in the brunt viscilla frequency the profiles were much simpler there, and we are dealing with with very very messy stratification The other nice thing because the fishing vessels are taking profiles every month anywhere between seven and 24 profiles a month went into this. This is the year to year variability right here. In terms of that frequency you can see that September 2019 75% of the profiles actually had intrusions there. In 2015, which was here with very many warm core rings. There there was 60% of the profiles, you know throughout the stratified season had these kind of intrusions there. I should add there was just a paper that appeared about two weeks ago by Adrian Silver who's now a postdoc working with me. So that 72% of the salinity maximum intrusions in Ecomon profiles occurred in proximity to warm core rings there so we don't know the dynamics. We're working on that right now but there's definitely a linkage to warm core rings. And so I think a second challenge challenge is can the hydrodynamic models capture the onshore advection of these offshore water masses and the organisms that are contained with them. And can they produce this kind of complex layering in temperature salinity and and presumably ultimately prey fields that we're seeing in the observations. Okay, now this is for me as a shelf break processes person sort of the horror story. I did three cruises in 2021 in March, May and June and we also put out a long range AUV in September of 2021. This is an image from the state of the ecosystem report right here for the year 2021 in June of 2021 there were eight warm core rings out there. It was just remarkable. We did a cruise on the Neil Armstrong, the last two weeks of June and saw very strong salinity maximum intrusions there, but it wasn't until we did the long range AUV mission in September. This is with Amy Caculia cybotics group that that got me to go and start looking in September a pioneer array data, and this is the salinity field from the near surface seven meters near surface instrument frame. It's a time series of salinity and it should be a straight line just like the left of that plot from April until mid June it should be at 33 this is well insured of the normal position of the front at seven meters depth. And it jumped up as high as 34.5 and stayed that high. We have taken a number of hydrographic sections during that time period. The shelf break front was at about the 50 meter ice bath for the summer there. Looking at the National Data Buoy Center temperature data surface ocean temperature data there. The left is that the temperature, the light blue by the way is 2012 red is 2021. There was a six degree sea warm anomaly in September of 2021 there. And I was just literally astonished at how long the shelf break front states so far and sure. And then just as a schematic this front should be at the edge of the continental shelf and it was more than 50 kilometers on shore of its normal position. Because I'm in close contact with the commercial fishing industry we were hearing, even while we were on the cruise that blue fin tuna which are normally in the Kenyans all summer and move in shore. Very late August first two weeks of September they were off a block island they were insured the 30 meter ice bath all summer it turned out to be a windfall for the charter boat captains because they didn't have to go all the way out to the shelf break they saved a lot of money on fuel there. There were very unusual species count those rays, Cobia that were reported fish that you might think of from the Carolinas or Florida were all over the outer continental shelf there. And perhaps, you know the most worrisome thing for me was that I was hearing from the reports filtered through the commercial fisheries research foundation that that the fishers were reporting. The largest marine mammal concentrations they had ever seen at the 50 meter ice a bath in the summer of 2021. So challenge number three. And the models capture these type of large onshore displacements of the shelf break front, I'll be working on that data and hopefully running a manuscript by the end of the summer on that I think that this this has important implications. Similarly, when the front moves to mid shelf. Does that change the gradients does that change the strength of the upwelling circulation we need to really think about that clearly it was concentrating marine organisms. By the way, there were traffic jams of pleasure craft. There were so many humpback whales out there that everybody with a motorboat was going out to see them because they weren't that far offshore there. So it had all sorts of impacts there. And so I want to point out there's a very significant implication here if the front sit mid shelf, the volume of shelf water coming down that goes into the cold pool must be a lot smaller again this was over five months there. And so, you know I would have expected like a volume transport of cold pool water to be reduced by at least 50% with the front moving that far and sure there. That's your implication these frontal displacements may move real concentrations of marine mammals to mid shelf right in the heart of the, the offshore lease regions there. So, you know, that's why I'm so glad I was given the opportunity to come here and speak because I think this is something that's not people are not generally aware of. And the last two weeks I'm part of a group that's informally called the squid squad, and we have weekly meetings during the fishing season to talk about how oceanographic variability relates to particularly the short fin squid catch. And we were contacted by Chris Orphanides, because he was saying, Oh, there's some interesting right whale distributions going on right now, you know, can you give us some thought about hydrographic sampling from whale map dot org that's a map from May 12 on the left there and the right whale locations. So there's three main areas to or at the shelf break, surprisingly there and one of them is on the, the western side of the great, great south channel it's kind of at the bottom of the the pink triangle there at the top. And in a figure, provided by Grace Jensen at UMass Dartmouth there one of a beach at Gangopadai students there. This is the Jennifer Clark chart blown up and you can see that both of those right whale concentrations are near warm core ranks that are adjacent to the shelf break front and we've had a lot of discussion about the the relation of the over the last month of the right whales and shelf streamers going around to the northeast portion of the rank shelf streamers the record I heard from Gordon wearing it used to be in the protected species branch. He said he saw 58 sperm whales and one shelf streamer there. So the shelf streamers really concentrate marine life and the fishing industry is well aware of that. So, I lean said I should put a few recommendations in so I thought I'd do that. And my major points are I think it's really important to accurately model the stratification, I think to get the prey fields right and particularly the concentration of prey. One of the reasons I took a little bit more time with the salinity maximum intrusions is that ocean processes are changing. They're changing in their magnitude they're changing in their frequency. And that's the scale that the organisms are having to deal with with feeding and behavior. One thing that I'm very sad about is that the pioneer array is outside of the region now and that has been a big loss I get emails I get phone calls what's going on. Two weeks after the pioneer array was pulled out of the water. I got a phone call about monkfish because they did not move offshore at their normal time period at the end of the fall. They moved offshore two months later than usual. And I think it was because a warm core ring pushed the front way and sure like in 2021 but we don't have subsurface observations so you know it's something I will be asking modelers during break times. And then finally, I do hope that that subsurface oceanographic data will be made available from the offshore wind industry and from people doing research I, you know I'm frantic to try and get up to date information because again I have people in the fishing industry asking me and when I had the pioneer array it was just fantastic you know it's like give me 10 minutes and I'll tell you bottom salinity and and I've lost that capability so I'll wrap it up there. Okay, wow thank you. Very comprehensive. Very thought provoking. We have time for a couple of questions for Glenn if anyone. There's one in the. Okay, thank you. Okay, I don't think I'm seeing that's good. You got a Kelly. Yeah, thank you. This is, can you comment on impact of solitons and turtle waves in the region and their impact on stratification and distribution on pray. Fantastic question. I don't think that that has been addressed yet and with these year to year changes in the surface density or obviously there there's big changes a year to year and peak stratification, which would affect the would definitely affect the, the amplitude and internal wave energy carried by the solitons there. That's something that's going to need to be looked at I mean that that directly feeds back into the strength of the stratification. Thank you. Time response to one of the. I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. So just literally one sentence from the perspective of ocean winds are south coast JV from the jump has been providing all the data, all the met ocean data that we gather to Naracus. And, you know, and I think you will find across the industry with the possible exception of wind data which has commercial impacts. I think you will find great willingness from the offshore wind industry to supply you with any data that we have particularly regarding that ocean condition. That is great to hear and merely points out my ignorance. Okay, thank you. Richard has a question. Yeah. So can you summarize the period of stratification. So that period sounds like it's persisting later in the fall. Yes, how about in the spring to break down. Absolutely depends on individual synoptic meteorology events. And basically in the fall, it's plus or minus 15 days for the breakdown. And it's I think the average is around mid October when it breaks down, but it can break down as early as mid September, you know, particularly when tropical storms pass through. And I should add that with ocean warming Fiona, I believe last fall was the most energetic tropical storm, you know, heading north that went right over me under the Gulf Stream and retained a lot of its energy even as far north as Nova Scotia. In the spring. So what happens is you'll start to get a one or two degree C thermocline and then if you get strong winds, it'll wipe it out. So the stratification forms, you know, gets wiped away forms again there. And I have a PhD student working on the fall de stratification. I can certainly send you the manuscript on that because he has a year by year breakdown. I think the spring, and it really needs more attention there in terms of the inter-annual variability, but it's very much weather dependent. But is the onset changing earlier? That's a that's a good question. I couldn't give a definitive answer. That's something we can talk about in what's whole sometimes. Okay. Yeah, one last question here. One last question about your finding that the Gulf Stream meanderings are moving further to the west. Yeah, because I attended recently a conference presentation about hurricanes, which are moving further north due to global warming, but they're actually also moving further west. And that was a very unexplained finding. And so I was wondering and curious about your opinion about whether the meandering of the Gulf Stream, whether it's actually continuing or it was just isolated to 2015. No, it's definitely continuing. Oh, no, it has huge implications for storms. And, you know, I really want to compliment the Rutgers group for their work on storms and particularly the evolution of intensity over continental shelves there. Scott Glenn and his group in terms of understanding how important the mixing before the core actually hits. That's really important. But no, these meanders are really large and I was pretty stunned. I think it was two days ago. Grace Jensen sent another Clark chart. There's a gigantic kink in the Gulf Stream right now. The north wall of the Gulf Stream is at 40 degrees north at about the 200 meter ice a bath. So if there was a storm that came through right now, it would maintain all its intensity could even be gaining intensity, right up to the shelf break. And so, you know, another consequence in terms of storms and infrastructure is that as the stratification increases, it's going to take more energy to get that cold pool water off up to de stratify and there was what was in 2011 hurricane Irene was much weaker when it hit hit the coast and then of course when Hurricane Sandy hit everybody was like, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, you know, go to the Poconos, you know, and then then that didn't lose any of its intensity crossing the continental shelf, which is why it's so important for the general public to know about seasonal stratification. So it sounds like they could be related. Absolutely. Okay, I think Josh had a stand up we'll do that and I recognize that there are a number of questions from people online, we'll see if we can come back to those later, but go ahead, Josh. Thanks Glenn as usual very relevant talk on the processes really appreciate that. My question is you mentioned briefly the title mix front. Yes, and a lot of the shelf processes that you talked about. And I wonder if you could just comment on how the Nantucket Sholes region that's the focus for this is interfacing with the title activities that are strength or stronger near shore and question and you know just that could be a whole mother talk I'm just not an expert in that and and what I would say is that the warming rates are differential because of the strong title mixing and there's a paper by Lisa on you from our department that talks in in a lot more detail about the spatial distribution here of the warming rates there. But you know one of the key things is the upwelling rates, and it's always so much more complicated in these title mixing fronts there. I don't know about how those upwelling rates are changing there but you know when talking to people and you know I certainly expect to learn more about the shifting spatial distributions of the right wheels there that needs to be looked at in detail how that is changing. We did the outer Cape Coastal current work in 2006 2007 and we recently put in a Sea Grant proposal to get a shelf research fleet at based out of Chatham. We need to know how that those water masses that are short circuiting there through the Great South channel are changing there. And I would say that's something that needs a lot more emphasis is those upstream flows feeding I was just wondering that stratification impact that you talked about the freshening of the surface right if that's going to change the way that title mix front. Oh it absolutely could it absolutely could and I was stunned in August of 2018 to see s max intrusion has gone straight into the title mixing front and then they were mixed away. Thank you. Thank you. We have some questions from committee members and I think we'll go ahead and take those.  Sure, thanks. And, and thanks Glenn that was a really great talk I learned a lot. I'm wondering one of your recommendations was about understanding changes. I can't remember the exact wording. I'm wondering your thoughts on to what degree that includes being able to predict those changes 510 20 years down the line or do you mean sort of monitoring and understanding changes as they're happening. We need both. And one of the things that that's just really struck me is how little I was able to predict changes we've seen that's kind of embarrassing. We originally came up with the pirate pioneer array concept in 2004 to look at all that fresh water that's going to be flooding out from the continental shelf. What did we find the shelf is getting more salty, and it was because of the Gulf Stream variability. And at that point I'd already been studying, you know that that that system for like 20 years and and I got that completely wrong. Now maybe the flood will come down. We need to understand the changes that are happening now, because I'm probably less confident than a lot of people about our predict ability to predict 510 20 years into the future. So, you know, we really get these processes understand the dynamics understand, you know what's necessary to resolve them and mixing is just a huge part that that underlays a lot of what I've had for my recommendations, the soliton question certainly brings that up. But but really both. Okay, thank you. Um, cows you had a question. Great.  Oh, great talk. I guess my question is that there's clearly been been some kind of regime shift. And, and within the context of recent observations since since the since since you've been making observations of the changes. There's some kind of stability. Yeah, like more reasons to believe in. No, no, that's a really, really important question. And, and so I think there's been been two particular time periods that people talk about so first of all, a VJ identified that 2000 shift into more warm core ranks. And he has a student looking at the wind stress curl right now. That's where Ian Gifford, and it does not appear that there were major changes in the wind stress curl to drive that. And so we were going to have to look at the stability of the Gulf Stream itself. And we want to look at the potential vorticity distribution, just to throw a little jargon in there. But but yes, there's clearly something about the stability characteristics that have changed. That's really important. And I mentioned Jamie Palters work and her student Afonso Neto. There's a tremendous amount of interest at the tail of the bank now because there's been a retro more retroflection of the Labrador current. And so one of the shocking things that we found from the pioneer array, and this was in a paper in 2018 is that the salinity over the upper slope has gone up by 0.7 PSU in the last 20 years there. And so you have much sharper salinity gradients at the edge of the continental shelf, you're transporting much more salt across the continental shelf. It's even getting to the title mixing front, which is, you know, I would not have thought that that was possible before. But I think that 2010 shift is really important because in talking to a lobster man in Rhode Island one time he said 2010 is a year everything went haywire I don't know what's going on, you know, since 2010. So this is why it's so important to hear all the different species about what's going on there to try and get a more comprehensive understanding of these particular regime shifts there. That's an important question though. Thank you. One final question, Doug, please. Yeah, this won't take long.  Thanks a lot. I'm just really, really instructive. One logistical question is, will the presentation be available to us to okay to paw back through because I've heard a lot of I like to pop back through. And the other one was you won't be surprised to my question how much you mentioned Gareth, some of Gareth's work along, alongside of this, how much of a lot of these data collection efforts have had those collection of zooplankton ecology and and even just backscatter data to go along with them. There has been a lot of e k 80 data collected there and andoni lavery has collected a lot of it and in fact during the, the task force ocean New England shelf break acoustics experiment and only in Tim Duda collected a ton of data there. So, I think it's really important it'd be nice if if there was some funding, you know, directly towards the identify identification of the zooplankton and I do want to say I'm going to contact Gareth there about that e k 80 data from the June 16 cruise because it was incredible is the first time I've seen an e k 80 in action. You could actually see at the lowest frequencies fish going back and forth to feed in the different layers. You know, so I was joking about there's the dessert layer there's the appetizer. It's like a trifle. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And that data really needs to be looked at because, you know, we have information about the physical ocean, oceanographic variability at the same time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Thanks again, but. Okay, thank you. And thank you for your presentation very helpful. So that's a good that question is a good segue to our next presentation, which will be given by Jeffrey runs who's a professor of oceanography in the school of marine science and the University of Maine and he's at the Darling marine center. Gareth is an expert in all things plankton I think he's worked with processes controlling plankton productivity plankton production impacts on higher trophic levels. And he's been involved with this work for for very many years so he's going to talk to us today about potential changes in ecosystem dynamics. I'm going to reveal from offshore wind turbine in the Nantucket Shoals region. So, Jeff, please. She'll screen. There's no screen. So can you share your screen is that Um, I, I don't know if you can see me I can't.  So, Jeff, we can run the presentation from our end if that's all right and we can advance at your prompt. So have we lost you Jeff are you still there. Can you hear us Jeff. It looks like we lost him, but I still his video is frozen. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Good idea. Eileen suggested we take a short break while we get him online. How about we meet back in 10 minutes. So at 1023 Cutting the break short by about a minute and a half here. Anyway, so we have Jeff back and And again, he's going to talk to us about is all plankton and the Gulf of Maine and then Tuckett Shoals. So Jeff, please go ahead. Thank you, Eileen and hello everyone. Sorry for that my computer just completely froze. And I didn't know any alternative but to restart. So I'm I'm going to focus. This presentation on the availability of prey for North Atlantic right whales, which I think is a subject of focus for it for your study. And I'm Going to a little bit of a contrast from Glenn's talk and focus more on the upstream sources. And what my attention has especially been on the Gulf of Maine and the potential role for the Gulf of Maine and and supplying zooplankton to to Nantucket Shoals and just generally what's happening to zooplankton in the region. With respect to the shifting oceanographic conditions that we've been talking about already. And so I will be presenting some of my own data. Or some of the data that I've been participating in and would like to acknowledge all the contributions of my co PIs including Nick record. And technical staff and students and collecting and analyzing these data and I'm also going to provide some review of of studies. In the region regarding zooplankton. And just acknowledging also the funding sources, one of which recently, it has been very critical and it's been very critical and it's been very critical and it's been very critical and it's been very critical. And critical and sustaining time series that I've been involved in which is pure ocean energy management. And so, I'm Glenn said that he's a physical oceanographer and not a biologist and I'm going to say I'm a biologist and not a physical oceanographer so I'm going to just provide my, my perspective of the physical conditions and especially the general circulation in the coastal Northwest Atlantic. And my view has I have a Canadian perspective on that since I worked in Canada for many years with DFO is that the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the Gulf of Maine. And I'm considered as a large scale at that couple that vector vesturine system driven by the huge discharge from the St Lawrence River, which itself drives a buoyancy current that flows through the Gulf of St Lawrence and down the Scotian shelf into the Gulf of Maine. And that I want to point out right away that the Gulf of St Lawrence is a huge source of Calanus species, Calanus fin marchicus other species but for the Gulf of Maine was relevant as Calanus fin marchicus. And so there's there are very large concentrations of Calanus fin marchicus and high production in the Gulf of St Lawrence. And there's also, as you see there's a laboratory current. There's a subsurface, Subwater Labrador subsurface water that flows down the shelf break and also can enter into the Gulf of Maine through the Northeast channel. And in addition, there's warm slope water that's adjacent to the shelf breaking between the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf Stream. And that can also enter into the into the Gulf of Maine through the Northeast channel. And so this this water that enters in flows down, especially in the main coastal current eastern and western main coastal current down past Cape Cod and some of it goes around Georgia's bank and some of it. And this is the residual circulation patterns goes past the south of Monmouth veneered along the shelf and out. And there's also a component that flows along the shelf break. So this this is the kind of general circulation pattern. And since 2010, as we just talked, we just been talking about there's been evidence for a shift in the in the Gulf Stream of the Gulf Stream, greater transport of warm salt, warm slope water into the Gulf of Maine higher salinities in the Gulf of Maine, higher temperatures. And even the possibility recently of Gulf Stream water modified Gulf Stream water flowing into the Gulf of Maine. Dave Townsend at the University of Maine has is publishing a review of the sources of water into the Gulf of Maine, which is coming out in progress in oceanography in July. And I think that's for me a very insightful review about what's going on in the Gulf of Maine sources of water. So just what's happening in the Gulf of Maine can be seen in the surface temperatures of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute website. They have a great summary of warming trends in the Gulf of Maine and in this figure here we see the time on the years on the y axis and months on the x axis and since 2010. The temperature anomalies have been especially positive, just indicating again the, the effect that the, that that is something important that happened around this time 2010. And that warming occurred not only at the surface, the surface temperatures on the left here policy surface temperatures. This is again from the Gulf of Maine website and also from nowhere. It's fishery state of the ecosystem report that the Gulf of Maine bottom temperatures have also been increasing, especially since 2010 so it's not just the warming in the Gulf of Maine. My perspective is not just a heat exchange between the air and the, and the ocean it's also shifting water mass transport and warmer water from different masses coming into the Gulf of Maine. So I want to talk about especially the observing programs for observing zooplankton responses to oceanographic conditions. And so I'll do that first, and then I'd like to just briefly summarize recent decadal trends in ocean graphic condition in the abundance of zooplankton in the Gulf of Maine with a focus on colonists from North Atlantic states and other prey pseudo colonists and some properties for North Atlantic right whales. And then at the end, I'm, I pose some questions and implications for Nantucket shoals zooplankton and wind turbine impacts so I'm providing. Maybe there's an opportunity here for a little bit of a gayly and dialectic synthesis between a Glenn's focus on on the shelf break processes and the transport of shelf break water into the Nantucket shoals. And the focus on this talk here is especially the Gulf of Maine and the Gulf of Maine is a source of supply of zooplankton to to Southern New England. So the first observing program in the Gulf of Maine that's been going on since 1960 is the continuous plankton recorder CPR. It's an apparatus that is told behind merchant vessels, tiny opening 1.3 centimeter squared opening that, that allows water in flows to pass a mesh that mesh winds up in formaldehyde and is analyzed by plankton experts for for the Gulf of Maine, those experts are located in a lab in Poland. And it's, it's co run between Noah and the Sir Alistair Hardy Foundation, and the line shown here runs from Nova Scotia to the Western Gulf of Maine, and that's been going since 1961. Another zooplankton observing program that's been going on since 1977 is of course the NOAA ECOMON MARMAP surveys and this is an example of the stations that are that that may happen it's a stratified random design. So the stations might vary each year, told with bongo nets of 333 mesh and from two to six surveys a year I think it's more on the lower end now and then has in the past and numbers of surveys. And finally, we have more recently that the near cruise which operates the integrated Sentinel monitoring network, ISMN. And it collects monthly, normally monthly it's now in the summer at CMPS at the which is the coastal main time series station located about five, five miles off the Damer Scott estuary at the western margin of the main coastal current. So a station that's sampled from University of New Hampshire from Portsmouth at the Wilkinson in Wilkinson Basin the Northwest tip, called the Wilkinson Basin time series station. And these product, the protocols the primary zooplankton collection is with a vertical 0.75 meter ring net toad from the bottom to the surface 200 micron mesh net. And it, the other sampling including CTD chlorophyll phytoplankton taxonomy that the protocols are similar to the Atlantic zone monitoring program, which was established in 1999 in the maritime region. You can see they there are some time series stations at Prince five and they are funding station to have Halifax. There are others in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. I actually was involved when I was up working fisheries and oceans in setting up the AZMP. And it was now has now been going on for over for 20 years. And so, I'm providing references as we go to, like there's the recent report to that we've made for bone about the, the ISMN stations fix stations in the, in the Gulf of Maine, the AZMB there's a link to reports of the data that are currently at the, as part of the AZMP. And then I also put a link to our pretty neat rap video on YouTube about called cruise cruise baby about sampling at these stations. So the focus, focus especially on the subarctic planktonic copepod Kalinsfin Marchicus, the primary pray for the North Atlantic right whale. The range of Kalinsfin Marchicus you see that the Southern New England is is pretty much thought to be at the southern edge of the viable populations that be producing populations of southern margin of the subarctic distribution that goes all the way up into Norway and into the Barents Sea. Kalinsfin Marchicus is especially and remarkably abundant in the North Atlantic ocean, and especially in the Gulf of Maine, there's something about the Gulf of Maine historically that has nurtured very large concentrations of Kalinsfin Marchicus is North Atlantic right whales go there. And so there's and if you look at the to the right here these plots of the proportion of copepod biomass and copepods make up most of the catch of Mesozo Plankton in a in these net toes 200 micron vertically integrated net toes. And copepods make up more than typically more than 80% of the abundance of plankton coppities caught and of the planktonic copepods Kalins species, whether it's in Canadian on shelf waters or there's several species, including Kalins hyperboreus arctic species in the Gulf of Maine it's primarily or almost all Kalinsfin Marchicus in Eve in all these waters. In the deeper waters, say greater than 100 meters Kalins species make up more than 70, between 70 and 90% of the biomass of the Mesozo Plankton of the Mesozo Plankton copepods. So hugely important to the foundation species to the whole functioning of the subarctic ecosystems in in in this region. So just some results from the NOAA Ecomon surveys, a study by Grieve et al, supported by NOAA 2000 that was published in 2017 so you see from the Ecomon averages different regions that they divided up the survey from the Gulf of Maine, the Mesozo Plankton, Southern New England, and the Mid-Atlantic Bight. You can see the mean average annual abundances of Kalinsfin Marchicus fluctuate by an order of magnitude have fluctuated over the past 30 years or so. The abundances average abundances in in the Gulf of Maine are say three to five times higher than what you might find in Southern New England, which is this orange line here. Just to give you a sense of the variability that can occur in abundances. Now I'm going to focus, especially on the period since more recent period since about 2000 at coming up. The Rubauji and his co-authors I was involved in this study looked at the seasonal patterns and coherence of Kalinsfin Marchicus in the Gulf of Maine and it's important that annual abundances. It's important to understand that the drivers of the population abundance of Kalinsfin have a strong sub annual seasonal component. For example, if you look at the left panel here in spring, the anomalies of Kalinsfin abundance across the NOAA Ecomon surveys for Wilkinson Basin, Jordan Basin, and George's Basin, three deep basins in the Gulf of Maine, there really is no trend in the spring abundance of Kalinsfin Marchicus. And they're fairly coherent among the three basins, whereas in the fall the coherence breaks down, especially between George's Basin and the other basins. And we see that since 2010, especially you can kind of mark it off around there, there has been a dramatic decline and these are log scale anomalies. So there's been a dramatic decline in these basins observed in the NOAA data. And so this is a decline, especially in the eastern Gulf of Maine has been correlated with the shift in foraging habitat of the North Atlantic right whale. Nick record led a study published in 2019 in Oceanography where taking NOAA data that was available for eastern Gulf of Maine before and after 2010. Since 2000, since say the year 2005. I mean that when there was in Jordan Basin when Kalinsfin Marchicus abundance Jordan Basin in the eastern Gulf of Maine when Kalinsfin Marchicus abundance was say greater than 40,000 per square meter. Lot, there were a lot of right whale sightings in the Bay of Fundy in the in the late summer fall. Whereas when their Kalinsfin Marchicus was not there, especially after 2010, the data that was available. Neither were the right whales and these abundances correlated with the increases in in temperature and correlated with this change in shifting water masses coming into the Gulf of Maine. And so Aaron's paper in 2021. They they looked at the CPR data that continues plankton recorder data. And also found that coherence with or with with what the ECOM on data is finding a lower Kalinsfin Marchicus abundances in the eastern Gulf of Maine. And that also correlated with the North Atlantic right well calving index, and in in this oceanography paper they were explicitly discussing kind of a regime shift that that occurred that centered around 2010. So it's important. I didn't mention that it's in. Well, I'll say it now it's important that the source. I consider that the important source of countless in March is coming into the Gulf of Maine is not from the warm slope waters or the slope sea that's just east of Northeast Channel, it is from the Nova Scotia current and Gulf of St Lawrence, and also, as contributions from laboratories slope water that are contributing countless in March this into the Gulf of Maine. So, I guess, here it is here so here you see the what I what I see is the primary source of Kalinsfin March is actually coming from the Scotian shelf in in this colder and fresher water into the eastern Gulf of Maine. And so we just saw that in the eastern Gulf of Maine Kalinsfin Marchicus abundances lower than since 2010. And we're off the question also is now what what's happening to Kalins in the western Gulf of Maine and which is as we see the residual circulation flows past Cape Cod and into southern New England. And we've been starting that especially Rubao G and others, I was involved in the study. Developed this scent idea of the importance role of that the main coastal current plays where it picks up individuals that are in the eastern Gulf of Maine Kalins and the main coastal current has food supply throughout the summer the temperatures for Kalinsfin Marchicus are just optimal in the main coastal current, and it grows and reproduces there and and by the time it gets to western Gulf of Maine, and say Wilkinson Basin, they've developed to the overwintering diapause stage and find this refuge in Wilkinson Basin to overwinter. And so from there in the spring, the animals come out of diapause and then reproduce, and then our source of of of Kalins to the western Gulf of Maine and southern New England. So that's there. It's important to emphasize that there's seasonality of primary drivers controlling abundance of Kalins. First is effective supply. And that's from external supply and the evidence for the regime shift in 2010 affects supply so less of the Kalins which cold fresh water from the Scotian shelf, more warm slope water entering in and affecting concentrations in the eastern Gulf of Maine and then there's effective supply in the main coastal current of affecting of abundances in the in the late summer in the western Gulf of Maine. And then there's very important local production, especially in the main coastal current and in waters just adjacent to the main coastal current where the fight up by the regime and temperature affect lipid accumulation and timing of diapause and reproduction. And finally predation, Peter we'd be just published a paper last year with his co authors, emphasizing that the predation may have an important role, and especially with higher temperatures and affecting abundances and this is especially as the predator field develops over the season. I see them as this credit predation components being especially important at the end of the active season in late summer and fall. We want to talk now about what's happened to countless in March this in the western Gulf of Maine based on our on the nearer because I SMN time series stations and just recalling everyone recalling the life cycle of a man starts out. The neg develops through six Nopla stages, then six co-pepidate stages. And so the stages that we're focused on the stages that North Atlantic right whales are especially interested in other lipid rich stages, especially stage C five and adults and stage C four. The ECOM on we're focusing especially on stage C three through through adult female here. This is what these are the stages that are primarily captured by the bongo toes of the Noah ECOM on survey. And we've also we count all all co-pepidate stages for the nearer coups stations but we're just going to focus on the state abundance of stages C three through C six as these these are probably the stages that North Atlantic right whales are especially interested in. And so here is a phrenology that we've prepared about G is has been involved in this especially and it's and it's the on the y axis is the y axis the abundance in a log scale normalized to individuals per meter cubed. The dark the time of year the year day is on the X axis. And so what we have here are the all these light gray points in the background are the ECOM on data from Wilkinson Basin. So this is the Wilkinson Basin time series station. The colored points are the observations from these fixed stations that just one station from the Wilkinson Basin station in northwest corner. And these vertically integrated toes. And just to see how they map on to the ECOM on data and we think it does a pretty pretty good job of of reflecting concentrations and you see that there's a there is an annual cycle where the abundances of Calanus are lowest in, say, February, March, and what in which time they're mostly in either stage C five or females ready to be produced. Then there's the parents of a lot more zooplankton a lot more phytoplankton food and spring vernal increase in the abundance of Calanus and March guess, especially younger stages. And then as they develop into the diapositing stage C five you can see the decline that occurs over over the summer and late fall. So, I point out especially that our time series stations at Wilkinson Basin started in 2005. And we see these red points here which is 2020 21. They're considerably lower than the than the longtime average, the average of the ECOM on data is this black line here. And with the twice and half the abundances in this dotted lines from that's from the ECOM on data. And so the woke the recent 2021 Calanus abundances are considerably lower than the long time than the historical average. It's plotted out since 2005 for that coastal main time series station and often in the western margin of the main coastal current in Wilkinson Basin in late summer, and in Wilkinson Basin in late fall and winter. And we can see declines occurring in all three places we believe that the CMTS main coastal current is a source of supply for Wilkinson Basin in later in the summer. And we can see where they where they are hard, the Wilkinson Basin harbors these stages that are developing in the main coastal current. And we can see that the abundance levels comparing 2008 to 2021 are somewhere between 15 and 40% of what they were. You know, back in before 2010. The spring it's a different story the spring again is as we see there's a decoupling, and even though there are fewer females say that come out of diapause in February March, if the conditions are right. They're so reproductive you can produce so many eggs per female say up to 60 eggs per female per day that you fewer females can still replenish the population so we don't see really any any trend. Over the long term in spring Calanus abundance. And so, so you know this this even though there are fewer females here there's, there's a lot of production that happens during the spring period. And we believe that this is in part due to it's changing more earlier availability of phytoplankton. This is chlorophyll biomass before 2010 and after 2010 at Wilkinson Basin, and, and even concentrations between 0.5 and one milligram per liter. In the period between, say in February March, when females may be coming out of diapause early because the temperatures warmer are encountering higher flight of food availability and being able to reproduce earlier and then and offset the lower concentrations that we see being supplied to Wilkinson Basin. So, also looking at other copepods in the zooplankton community before and after 2010. The red is significant increases in the in in abundance. These are ranked a court from smallest micro Calanus to largest in Calanus is up there somewhere can't see it with as far in a way. There we go. So, Harry Akita is a predator on on the copepods since the largest and then Calanus is sort of like the second largest copepod in the system. And what is important is from this point of view as well. First is Oetona has increased greatly in the six year period since 2010. And so has pseudo Calanus and Centropagies. Two of the species that are also considered as common prey for, especially when Calanus is not available for North Atlantic right wheels. So, let's see if I can shift this. So coming now to Nantucket Shoals and so here's, again, the perspective is upstream sources into Nantucket Shoals. And I've from based on the look at the circulation patterns. I'm not really know much about zooplankton on on Nantucket Shoals. What what's there and what what observing programs apart from the NOAA stations that are there they are common stations that are sampled there. Based on the circulation pattern, it seems like that the Gulf of Maine, the main coastal current Wilkinson Basin, especially in the spring. It's an important source of supply to zooplankton zooplankton to Nantucket Shoals. And also Nantucket Shoals harbors the highest abundance of pseudo Calanus and Centropagies. In the Gulf of Maine and Fall and Winter where I believe that's where North where the North Atlantic right wheels are especially observed is in Fall and Winter. Since 2010 the abundance is a pseudo Calanus and see Centropagies typical that we as we just saw have increased in the Western Gulf of Maine. That's likely due to the increased temperature and higher chlorophyll concentrations and Fall and Winter that I pointed out. I'd like to say that the late Lippard Ridge stage of the Calanus and Martyrus in the Gulf of Maine we do not find them. They're not common in and are not in great abundance at depth shallower than 75 years due to their high visibility to visual predators. So just to back up some of these. I would like to point out Rubau Gees study in 2009 where he he actually modeled a couple of physical biological model of Centropagies and pseudo Calanus abundance. The Myrmat climatology from 1977 2006 for the different winter spring summer and autumn periods is here on the top panel and the model results on the bottom panel. And I just point out in winter and spring especially how warmer temperatures there how pseudo Calanus and Centropagies are the highest abundances in this period are especially in that Southern New England area. Likewise for Centropagies. So the Southern New England area. In the climatology and the modeling. That's where you find highest abundances and so I mean, thinking about it maybe North Atlantic North Atlantic right well as must know that as well. But also in Cape Cod Bay, because they were there where they go so these the Southern New England Western Gulf of Maine Southern. High concentrations of pseudo Calanus and Centropagies before the Calanus and Marcus late lipid rich stages come online. And just backing up the Calanus and Marcus this is our observations of abundance of Calanus and Marcus late stages in the Gulf of Maine, where we don't really see them until bottom depth gets to about 100 meters of 75 to 100 meters. And then finally then the questions that I might pose having not much knowledge about impacts of offshore wind farms on on zooplankton. And so I've given an overview more of the potential effect of the role of infection, especially in local production and predation. In in upstream supply to North Nantucket Shoals but really the questions for that. They're a finer scale that I'm not really have a great understanding of is whether or not they're a fine scale patches and aggregations of these three. Is it a lone prey species for North Atlantic right whale on Nantucket Shoals, or does mixing on the shoals prevent aggregations from occurring these are questions that I just don't know and and Glenn it's just listening to his talk and I think it looks like for fine scale aggregations to occur that are the scale that are of interest to plankton feeding whales. And would offshore wind turbine significantly disrupt these aggregations if they occur. And our North Atlantic right whales in Nantucket Shoals feeding on other prey besides talents pseudo counts and centropages. And another question would be, would a field of offshore wind turbines by altering turbulence affect the vertical distribution of phytoplankton micro so plankton and therefore affect the feeding rates of suspension feeding so plankton. And, you know, if there aren't patches of perhaps there are patches of in the vertical of prey that allow for higher feeding rates and therefore say growth and reproduction and so plankton copepods, especially that are omnivorous. And I would note that if that does occur that because of the effective patterns I wouldn't think that that would be an impact on population abundance is there that that that would be a downstream effect, and it really depends on the footprint of these any impacts on mixing processes of the offshore farms, whether or not that would have any influence at all in the population dynamics of the so plankton. And finally as the fifth one listening to Glenn. I'm wondering now about the relative roles of shelf break processes and transport from the shelf break on to Nantucket Shoals versus the substream sources and what are those relative roles I don't have any idea about that but he's kind of I've kind of see now that there's an important contribution, possibly of both sources of supply. Hey, I hope you've heard all that. Yes, we did. Thank you. Do we have questions for for Jeff. Yes, Glenn, go ahead. Very informative talk Jeff. A media question is, you mentioned the importance of predator fields. And one thing I hear about is longfin squid continually heading further north and I know that they are very voracious feeders. Do they feed on Calanus. The other one that I've heard quite a bit of talk about is black sea bass also heading further north. Right. Yes, and I, to my knowledge, I don't think any of them are directly feeding on on on count the measles O plankton, possibly you fovs it's, but the predators thinking about especially for Calanus species are species are you fovs is especially Megan Tiffany's Megan Tiffany's Norvegica, which is a predator on cobalt pods and it's very abundant in the main coastal current and in the Gulf of Maine, but we don't have, we don't catch it in our nets. It's one of the under known species, or under sampled species. It's maybe better sampled by acoustics. And another important predator are gelatinous so plankton jellyfish. And Peter we be paper emphasize the possibility of jellyfish predation being especially important in some years. And then there's also herring and sand lance that are forage fish are important predators of the Calanus. And I don't know if there was a second part to your question Glenn but I'm curious about the predators that's all. Thanks. So adult fish don't feed on Calanus but a lot of the juvenile life say is do cod for example. Is that fish under 40 centimeters or so. Right. Yes. Yeah and the forage fish even the adult herring herring and sand lance. Yes please. Thank you for that talk I'm I'm coming from a physical oceanographic perspective so spare me some benefit. You mentioned the different stages of the the life cycle, and I'm wondering if there's any evidence of different stages being more or less dependent on physical processes like is there a. I'm assuming the younger stages are more dependent on transport processes but when we think about stratification and how it might affect aggregation is that limited to the adults is it limited to some of the other stages that you mentioned. So an advection applies across the board, all stages. The as the as the these the copepods let's say Calanus develops the older stages starting say stage C3 and especially above stage C5 and females undergo vertical migration so they have more control of their, their vertical distribution, or they exert more control of their distribution and that especially is the their migration their diapods migration in the fall where they, the stage C5 will migrate and stay deep in waters. In the slope waters it's 400 greater than 400 meters in the Wilkinson Basin which is only 250 270 meters deep their mode vertical distribution of the overwintering stages. These these late adult state late pre adult stages is around 150 meters 120 to 100 say 200 meters. It's difficult to survive. Nevertheless, in Wilkinson Basin at those steps. So the younger stages and not the stages and the competitive stages are especially subject to surface surface transport. Say, Thank you Richard you have a question. A comment to collaborate on something Jeff had said Jeff. Good speculation on what might be in the Nantucket shows because there has been a little bit of analysis done by the Northeast Center for 2020 through 2022 from their cruises, and basically Centropagies is the most common zooplankton on the Nantucket shows and so countless and countless are about equal piece of those surveys. So good speculation. And, and one thing we're noticing is an expansion of Centropagies expansion of its seasonal abundance, not just in the fall but more in the summer and into the spring, and how much higher abundance. Centropagies is one of those species I think that's taking that's really taking advantage of the warmer temperatures. Is Centropagies as energy rich as countless. No, I sort of see Centropagies, like a traitor Joe's burrito, compared to say salmon, if for a human. If that if that makes any sense, anyone's ever bought traitor Joe's burritos you disappointed. You're setting us up for launch Jeff okay. Yeah, one question. Yeah. Hi, this is Emily Hildreth from BOM. I am a lawyer by training so that's my decline disclaimer that you should probably meet me, but I was just thinking and I am going to use my hands so one of the things I noticed that you said and in all the maps I've seen so far today, everything is pretty much going north south. The really large concentration of wind farms in the Rhode Island mass area is south of the shoals. So when you're talking about oceanographic effects, it would be that downstream zone where you would see most of those effects and I know we've looked at wind roses to and I think at least more than half it's the same thing it's going in that direction. And I think you acknowledge that some but it was like this sort of tiny note. And I just found that like really interesting and really notable so I guess it's not a question but I'm hoping you can correct me if I'm just like crazy and a lawyer trying to be in a science meeting. I'll refer to Glenn on on this but the forces that are driving the, the north to south circulation are not not primarily wind driven there. They're there have to do with fresh water input and density gradients in the water. And that's about which way the wind is going. I don't know if that's kind of. Jeff, that's definitely correct. And just just to add a little bit more that is absolutely certainly true that it's mostly going north to south or west to south of New England there. And as Jeff said that all the freshwater input makes the water on the continental shelf, less, less dense than offshore and that that density gradient is what drives the, the shelf break jet there, but there's also. And I hate to use a bit of gar jargon but on a long shelf pressure gradient that drives the depth average component to the flow, and the two components are about equal to each other. And since you're a lawyer, this came up in a recent murder case. Have to throw that in there. We're actually somebody. They were fishing boat and their mother went down with the boat and they were found 80 kilometers east of where they said the boat went down. And that was shown to be an error there. So it is, it's actually important legally too. Okay, thank you. All right. Yes, please go ahead. This is fantastic observation all the detail, but most of the transport we have seen that has been say residual transports, all the maps you have shown, but it's strongly title so isn't there a strong say dispersive transport due to the tides. Sometimes that can be even bigger than the residual transport so that, you know, types transports down and go back but still they push a lot of along the gradients. And I chose more about this than I do, but as you go further east and into the Gulf of Maine the tides are very important and particularly on the north flank of Georgia's bank you get very strong residual title currents there. What's interesting is as you get closer to Hudson Canyon that's a minimum in the M2 semi diurnal tide there. And that was one of the reasons actually the pioneer array location was chosen, so that we could look at the buoyancy driven flows in isolation there. So generally the further west you get the less the title influences. You know, in the New England shock region most of the two secretion important ones will come from Georgia's bank. Georgia bank had a secretion go down. Another one just from Cape Cove secretion this most like a residual current also buoyancy driving current, but the problem is now when the warming, you know, saw some Georgia bank a front to become strongly because like a glance and I know like a strong wind and they're in so southern Georgia bank, you know, stratification becomes strongly. That's why they get intense fire, southern wall floor to go down. So another thing is no coming change also making a Jordan basing, like like Wiccanson basing like Jeff managing is the clockwise circulation is identified the Cape Cove currents that can be can be intensified. So water come from government region or upstream or also Georgia bank region. But you know, so, you know, LTR SF LTR, a long time to transfer, you know, started from the short region from Cape Cove region, the start of their gun down. They had a chance they only had a five year data. So every month they get a survey. So they get a most of the five years or the data of their zooplankton you train data they get another renewed contract for the next five year. They shouldn't have a lot of zooplank data there. Yeah, I forgot to mention LTR that they have that and Glenn you know about that and they have the Martha's from your observatory and stations there. I'm my senses that they're especially emphasizing the phytoplankton field with the remote sense with the autonomous or imaging systems that they have. I'm not aware. Maybe you can correct me that about zooplankton data being collected. Yeah, Jeff, you're you're right and they do focus a phytoplankton but they do have a micro zooplankton some others open the data. You know, yeah. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Any other comments. Oh, sorry, need to look. More so that I guess this a question for Richard and Aaron and Jeff. Richard you started to talk a little bit about it with the different species and their energy value to the population. Could you dig into a little bit more we've talked about some of the aggregations the one that has been seen in May. And where there was aggregations off of New York by that one of our projects found off in New Jersey in recent years and then of course Nantucket Sholes Cape Cod Bay and that the energy value to individuals and what species are present. That's a big question maybe it's too big to answer here but I would be interested to hear what folks think about that or have to say about that. Go ahead. Yeah. I was going to say at least those concentrations that were to the west of Nantucket Sholes and the ones that are on Nantucket Sholes now. There's not much sampling going on so it's a little hard to tell what they're actually might be feeding on. I don't have the caloric values off the top of my head. I'll just say that Calanus late stages are much bigger than Centropagies or pseudo Calanus and their lipid content energy rich wax esters is way much higher than Centropagies or pseudo Calanus. So there is caloric content in Centropagies and pseudo Calanus, pseudo Calanus does have a small lipid storage. But there's no question that as North Atlantic right wells would tell you that Calanus and Marchakas is the desired prey for energy content. And a lot of this also depends on the density of the prey aggregation. So you can have pseudo Calanus out there and really high densities which could balance for low density Calanus but it's also not known. I'll add that Calanus and Marchakas is probably the highest energy content per these different species that we're looking at. And so that would have probably the biggest effect on right whale reproductive success. But right wheels are feeding on these other guys Centropagies pseudo Calanus. My guess is when dense aggregations of Calanus and Marchakas are not available. So when we're thinking about the effects of prey, you know on right wheel demography through the mechanism of reproduction, maybe looking at Calanus and Marchakas is the most important. But we're also thinking about the effects of prey on right wheel distribution. And so then the abundances of these smaller bugs really can come into play. And another addition to that is that, you know, we did a lot of survey effort in Southern New England over the last 20 plus years. And I went up that up to 1997 we started that we did not see concentrations of large whales, either humpbacks or fin whales, not speak of right whales like we're seeing now. So in the last decade, something has fundamentally changed in those areas. And there's unfortunately this is not an area where that's open today has ever really worked up. Yeah. One thought that I forgot to put in my talk are the hotspots getting hotter. And one of the processes that we've been thinking about a lot are the streamers around the warm core rings there. And, you know, just in talking with the local fishing community there they're seeing unbelievable concentrations to the northeast of warm core ranks and I've had a paper published a month ago showing that most of the short fin squid the highest catches are to the northeast of a warm core ring. That's right where the shelf break jet deflects off shore right there. And one of my former PhD students Jacob Forsythe estimated that the upwelling rates to the northeast of a warm core ring can be up to 100 meters a day in these shelf streamers there. So that's a full order of magnitude larger than is normally in the shelf break front there. So that, you know, I'm wondering if that's leading to some of this increased number of concentrations. It could very well that this there's some concentrations that we're seeing this winter spring that for me seem really unusual. We would see groups of right whales together but not a lot of other species with them. But now we're seeing these large aggregations of right whales humpback fin says and then small stations there at the same time. So there's something different is happening, and it could be something like that with overlaying that the sightings with what you've got on warm core rings would be really useful. And he has some of it but we have this more data now. Okay, it's a very interesting discussion and we'll come back to it but in the interest of time I think we'll go on if people need to take a break then. One more comment for the for the panel that might be important since I thought of it while Glenn was talking in, which is something in the marmap data. I've seen that that there is in springtime there's an important countless concentration right along the shelf break south in southern New England. And if there are incursions that that might be an important other source of countless than the upstream is is this springtime abundance of countless remarks along the shelf break being an intruding into the North Nantucket Sholes. Okay, thank you. And I'm sure we'll be coming back to this topic as we go forward here. We need a break get out you can get up and move but I think in the interest of time we're going to go ahead and move on to the next part of the agenda here. These are from European colleagues and it's getting late in their day. So, we'll go ahead and talk let them make their presentation and we have a series of three presentations that will give us a European perspective on offshore wind turbine effects on hydrodynamics and ecosystem changes. I'm not sure of the order in which we'll go here but we have gone from Ute Dowell and Arianna Zampolo, making the presentation so please go ahead. And I'm not sure, like I said who will be going first. Okay, you're first. All right, and, and Goren is at the University of Gothenburg and Scotland for Sweden's please. Okay, can you hear me and see my screen. Yes, looks good. Thank you. Okay, let's see. Okay, so I will talk about offshore wind farms and how they possibly can impact ocean dynamics and biochemistry. And my name is Jaram Bröström, as you must have gotten in Sweden. So there's a lot of plants for offshore wind farms around the world, especially in Europe. So these green ones they are, I guess is the existing ones. So this is in the development phase and these are planned, so a lot of new in Sweden, I'm here by the way Gothenburg, and this dark blue is what is planned in the long term so this is something that is going to quite big in the future and very, very big wind farms. We need to start to think how to look on how these wind farms impact on the ocean. And also, you need to see that this is probably important for future energy mix. There's also some plants in the US, because I guess when techie shows his systems.  You don't have kites as you're in the North Sea, as we will talk about, then you have a quite mixed layer that you start to get a certification and you get a surface layer. But for instance in the Baltic Sea, you don't have kites, so the many areas you don't have strong kites. Of course the fundaments by themselves will create some mixing. If you have a flow, you have a structure here, you will create some curls, swirls around that will go downstream. So if you have a pandemic area, you will have a flow around it and you will create these wakes that will go around. This is mixing. I'm not sure if I don't want to talk about it. But if you put Reynolds number against dental number, ocean wind from turbines is in an area where you create wakes and a lot of mixing. And I think Öte will talk more about this. So I'll leave it. What I will talk about. This is the work I did in 2008. So this is the wind wake and how it possibly can impact on the ocean dynamics. So if you have a wind blowing in this direction, then if the wind changes slowly, you will have a strong air transport on the stop pod. But behind the wind form, you will have a wind wake, but you have lower wind speeds. So the air transport will be weaker. So it weaker there. So it's strong, weak, weak and strong. So this implies that you have a convergence or a downward in this area. And you have a divergence in the upper water or upward in this area. And wind fronts probably have a 20% reduction in wind speeds. So there is a 40% reduction in the wind stress. So the wind stress is proportional to the wind speed squared roughly. So this is from a model experiment with MIT UCM model. So here I have the wind direction in that direction. And this is the change in term plan position. After one day, if you have a wind stress that is 0.05 Newton per square meter, this is roughly five meters per second wind. And you will get an aquilling that is about one meter. And downwelling that's about one meter. After five days you get an aquilling that is about two meters and a downwelling that is about two meters. And you can see that this is the wind forming red. So these things, aquilling patterns and downwelling patterns and downwelling patterns. They are much, much larger than the wind form itself. And on the stratified ocean is too much extent they're governed by the internal rospir radius or internal radius of deformation. So if you have a double wind, after one day, you see that the signal is actually about doubled, but after five days, the signal is not so big difference between a weak wind and a strong wind. So it's a bit larger. It's a bit more upland, but it's not doubled in size. So it's a bit complex. So this is just showing the dipole. Let's just say that. Sorry, I forgot that you can see that it's moves to the right. That is the eggman transport, but it also moves up wind. So what is that. So this is a case when you have barotropic. So you have a wind from about there. This is the vorticity that you see, then you can see you can create some positive and positive and negative vorticity. This is a smoke ring, just a lot bigger. So this is a self-advecting because of non-linearity between the vorticity cells. And here is a new, there's a new wind after 240 hours. So you can again see these vorticity cells, and you have this self-advection pattern in this region. And ours still have this from the last wind event. This is periodic, and here is that new one that's gone through the boundary zone. So you will create a lot of vorticity. This is on a barotropic case. For a baroclinic case, it's a bit more complicated. So this is simulations, sorry, the wind direction in this direction. I didn't see that until late. So anyway, here you could create these dipoles.  This affects a little bit in this direction. So you have this self-advection of the dipole system. It also creates a big area of downwelling and upwelling. Now if you blow the wind a little bit stronger, you can see that you get the same pattern. But eventually, the air current is so strong it blows everything away. And the vorticity you create here by curl tau is net zero. So you have the possibility to actually not get an impact at all if you have a strong wind. So it is complicated. I would say perhaps more studies are needed to understand the dynamics of this, how it affects the vorticity in the ocean. So does it exist in the real world? So this is study where I was a lead water, but it was actually Elke Ludwig who did the modeling and Anja Schneerhorst that did the observations. This is a model. Here is a wind that the offshore wind form is here. So you have a wind wake with low wind speeds. On the flanks, there is actually high wind speeds. And before the wind form there is again a little bit low wind stress wind speed. So let's think the wind is going in this direction. So this figure is about this size, that figure. So let's look at the east section, these observations. So the east section, you would get an upwelling and you would get a downwelling. So this is going more towards, so this is going in that direction. And if you look in an observation, you can see this upwelling and this downwelling. And this is the place of the wind form. So this is the place of the wind form. So you can see that in the observations, there seems to be an indication of the pattern that you can see as an evidence of its consistent with theory. On the southern section, remember that the tanks tends to move in the direction of the right of the wind. On the south section, you can also see this, there is a downwelling pattern here and perhaps not one impact on her that is also reproduced in this model of ocean model. So it was a couple model of atmospheric ocean. So there were some evidence here. Flutter et al did a study. So they looked at these wind forms in the North Sea. So they took a ship and they went up and down like this. Now this was not operating at the moment. So you couldn't see anything from them. So this E is from that one. So in the wind form, you really don't see much. And the wind portion is in that direction. So it's going down. But when it comes to these points here, D1 and U1, you can see something that resembles a downwelling pattern and you can see an upwelling pattern. When it comes to U2 and D2, you can again see the downwelling pattern and upwelling pattern. And we're going to D3 and U3. You see a downwelling pattern and an upwelling pattern. So this is consistent with that you could create an upwelling, downwelling pattern. So this was June 27th, June 29th, again, then went like this. So this pattern, yeah, T2 here. You do see a downwelling pattern, upwelling pattern, and U3, D3. Again, you can spot it. But this is in the area of strong mixing. So you actually have these tidal fronts that goes around here and tidal jets. So I wouldn't say that you can conclude that there is a proof of this upwelling downwelling pattern. You can see an indication that it seems to be consistent with what we predict. And this was after strong wind events. So here you have actually a lot of mixing. So that has reset these upwelling, downwelling pattern 4-4. But again, you can see that it's U1, D1 in this sphere. You get an upwelling, downwelling. There you can get a downwelling upwelling. This is a little bit more yellowish and this is a little bit more purple. So you can say that this may have been downwelling and upwelling. So there is a lot of, there is some work using models to evaluate the impact of this proposed upwelling, downwelling pattern that occurs from, that you have a lower wind behind a wind farm. And Christensen in 2022, Uter will talk the next presentation. She will describe a lot more of these processes. And, yeah, write down your name, but I can't, Carl Stalba. I also did some work on the upwelling used by offshore wind farms development on the California coast. So it's a bit interesting. This is a few days old. So it's a commercial research in this and grant this issuance in the Gulf of Mexico. This is hybrid page of something. I didn't read it. It came yesterday or two days ago. There seems to be no evaluation on hydrodynamic impact and how changes in hydrodynamics impact on the environment. And I think it's, is, is, I think it can be an important issue. So as a final comments, wind wake will create an upwelling and downwelling type of it is actually quite well anchored in theory. It's really looking on what is the dynamics. It seems to be absurd. But it's not really so easy to detect. We expect it to be a tech detected by satellite observations, but it's not to be so easy to detect it, but it's in areas with a lot of variability. Modeling studies indicated changes. It changes the network environment, and we will talk more about that in our presentations. We will have a change in 20, 10 to 20% for productive in a quite large area. There is much larger than the ocean in primary. And also pointing out the solid structures can be important. They can be important for increased mixing. And also be important for basic growth of muscles in an area where you don't have muscles. And when they die or get ripped off the structure they can have a transport organic material to the bottom. They also impact on the, on the plankton community in the surface water. We know that oil platforms in the North Sea are have, for instance, cold water coral coral, Lofelia, and they can be transported to nearby regions. I would say this is a positive environmental impact. You can also have an organist that you don't want invasive species. So, maybe wind wake and upwelling and mixing from fun elements are the largest unknown regarding environmental index and that's known. It might be unknown as well. So I added some recommendations. And it is important that just at that one sets up a monitoring program, and that should be started well before the wind farm is set up either twice you won't be able to distinguish natural variability on what comes from the wind farm and this is an area of highly natural variability. And it would be nice if the modern program is producing real time data, and it can be using operational models for atmosphere. And a recommendation of logic. I don't have that much resolution is important. It's not everything. Getting the regional features correct is probably essential. And this is what Glenn said earlier. So you really need higher resolution on the whole coast. I think there's important that there is a biochemical model available for the numerical model one will use. And I also would go for. I do like open source models, and that the setup for the study is made available and ready to run. Thank you. Okay, thank you. I was going to say we had whole questions but yes, go right ahead. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm Mary Boatman from bone and I just want to point out the environmental assessment that you showed was for lease issuance. And for lease issuance at bone we analyze site characterization and site assessment. We do not analyze wind farms at that point in the process down the road when we get a construction operations plan. That's when we would analyze the wind farm. So this is strictly looking at surveys and the possibility of a met buoy. So there would be no issues or concerns with hydrodynamics and that's why it's not analyzed in that document. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification. Jeff French had a question in the chat here and we'll maybe do this and then we'll move on to the next presentation. And he was wondering about the footprint, the distance from the center of the farm of the hydrodynamic impact of the wind farm. How does it relate to the area of the wind farm and the number of turbines per unit area. Yeah, it's a good question. The wind wake. I mean this is all the wind wake. So you have a wake that comes from extracting then it is not much to do about it. So I think this will be discussed later. Remember her name. So maybe she's better answer the question but it's it's actually quite long. It's typically over five times the size of the wind farm area and this. So if the wind farmer covers an area of five by five kilometers, you can expect an impact on at least 30 by 30 kilometers, I would say. Okay. All right, thank you. There is another comment in the chat from York that you might want to look at here. I think we'll go ahead in the interest of time to move on to the next presentation. And I think you are the one making this presentation. Yes, thank you. Yes. Okay, thank you. Okay, and Ute is a physical oceanographer and she is at the Helmholtz Centrum Heron and has been working on looking at the impacts of wind farms on fisheries and other impacts on coastal marine ecosystems. So please go ahead. Thanks a lot for inviting me and give a bit of an overview about the impact of offshore wind farms on the Southern Osea ecosystem. And this is, I will present results from the America modelling work that we've been doing for a few years now. First question, can you see the presentation or do you see presenter's mode? No, we see the presentation. Perfect. First, I'd like to acknowledge that my co-workers, it's Chris Hansen, who did a lot of the modelling work in our group and just finished his PhD with us. And Navid Akhtar, who is an atmospheric modeler and Korean ashram. A bit to the introduction. I'm glad that Joran gives that basic introduction into the processes that are related to these wind rake effects. So that saves me a lot of time by explaining these people pattern and how that affects the environment. But I will show results from modelling work on a regional scale and that might answer some of the questions that came up before. How does that actually affect the environment on larger scales and what are the scales that you can expect? This is the background of the NRC. Just very recently in the under declaration, the NRC has been born as a green power plant of Europe, which will mean that they're planning or they committed to an installation of over 300 gigawatt by 2050, which is about 10 times of what we have today. And here in the map you see the different plant and construction areas. So in red is what is fully commissioned right now. And then there are a lot of other areas that are in discussions to kind of fulfill these 300 gigawatt, which is really, really a lot. Now when we think about the NRC, this is a very strongly used areas. Just when we kind of put on top of this the marine protected areas, we already see there are quite some regulations and restrictions on where you might be able to plant these offshore renewables. And there are other users of course, there's shipping, there's fisheries, there are military regions. So the NRC is really getting into an industrialized state. And so it becomes much more important now to know what are the impacts on both physics and biology in that area. So as Jürgen just said, there are basically two impacts we are talking about here. One is the wind speed reduction due to energy extraction in these windbanks. And the other one is the direct impact by structures in the ocean that typically create additional mixing in the system. And we have looked at both, but separately until now. So there are a lot of things to look at in future for example. So I will go through all the different impacts that we've found so far and hope I can clarify a bit. A bit to the windwakes. From satellite images, there have been shown that in 60% of the images you can see is these windwakes appearing and Lee also informs. And the relative wind decreases about 10 to 20% inside the wakes. These wakes can lead to up to 65 kilometers and Lee of the offshore windforms, independent of the atmospheric stability. So there's a very stable atmosphere you have very long wakes. There is a dynamic atmosphere these wakes are much shorter, sometimes not even seen. And of course, considering that there will be so many wind parks in the system, there will be also superposition of these wakes and they will affect each other. From numerical modeling, we've also seen that there is a generation of turbulent kinetic energy along these atmospheric wakes. And of course, there is an alteration of the wind forcing at the sea surface boundaries. Here is a sketch from David Acta's publication on simulating offshore wind effects and the atmosphere. Here we have on the left side the wind speed and the right side turbulent kinetic energies and this dashed line is a simulation without windparks and then the full lines of simulations with windparks. And then you see, while you have at the sea surface a reduction in wind speed, and in the atmosphere you have a strong increase in turbulent kinetic energy which doesn't necessarily reach the sea surface. So how does that affect the ocean?  And we look at the regional scale under the conditions of current, yeah, now installed windparks in the southern sea. So this is a German bite area. And this is from a simulation with an unstructured grid model schism where the windwakes have been parameterized using an empirical formulation deduced from satellite images. On the left side you see the estimated wind speed reduction in the also in terms, and you can very see very nicely on how long these waves actually go in the surrounding also in parts and then in the right side you have to change and current velocities of the surface. So you have a direct impact on what's happening in the surface current velocity. So clear process chain energy extraction reduction of wind speed at sea surface and then change in sea surface currents. However, as we've heard before, there is a whole process chain related to this process actually. And a somewhat closer look and an average situation for summer in the whole North Sea shows on the one hand the mean change and wind speed which is actually quite substantial in the areas where there are a lot of wind from clusters. But in addition, we do have a general change and the residual currents, which is actually substantial and covers almost the whole area. And there is an additional change in the surface elevation. This is very small change, but it shows that these depots actually when there are a lot of wind farms clustering together also these system response clusters into larger depots. And this also impacts the certification of the system. So the noisy is a system which is strongly impacted by tights. We use the same model set up to assess whether the tights actually mitigate these effects that have been described before. However, there's the same answer to a good model. Nils perform simulations with tights on result type and looked at whether there is an impact on the process magnitude. On the left side here you can see actually a representation on how the effects look during flood type and how they look during applied. And here you can already see that there is a very strong impact and of course that makes sense. In this case the wind actually comes nicely from the southwest. So you have, in case of a flood type you do have an alignment with the currents. And you get this nice reduction of current speed and lee of the wind farms. Well, but of course in uptie the currents go in the other direction. You still have a reduction of the wind induced currents on the surface, which means that the actual current speed becomes larger because it's going in the opposite direction. And this is a process of we haven't gone through that so much before but it means that the effects are actually mitigated by the up streams. And it's not only on the surface where we see that but actually when you look in the radical you do see that it's actually going all the way to the sea bad which is here but so deep. On the right side. On the right side he estimated the difference for a simulation risk types, which is on the left side and it's current speed up here and then there is stratification in the lower panel. And this is the same simulation, but he did not force the simulation was tight so there is no types in this simulation. In principle, you can see that the pattern is somewhat different, but what is most striking here is that the effect is actually about. And for the current is about 10 times or maybe five times as high as it would be recitides for the current speed and also for the stratification. The effects without tights are much stronger than which tights. So here, he clearly concluded that this periodic tile currents can mitigate the impact of the wind speed reduction over time due to the opposing changes in the horizontal flow. But we also see that in this very well mixed areas that comes with the tights in the shallow areas. This is kind of a secondary effect that mitigates the impact of the offshoring parks because the tile steering can influence the effect of the vertical transport and therefore eternity impacts on temperature and salinity and certification. So, types play a very important role and when you have a system with strong ties, these general effects can be mitigated by the types. So we also wanted to see what happened to the ecosystem now. And therefore we set up a different model system because we need the ecosystem model. And we use the model chain here with atmospheric forcing that I showed before where we have offshore wind farms directly parameterized inside the atmospheric model. And then we do have a grid system with a two kilometer resolution here that is coupled to a lower traffic level ecosystem model. This is a simple well flow diagram of this model and it basically says that there are kind of sweet types of nutrient cycle simulated. So we find a plant and groups to the plant and groups that's a very typical and PZP type model. And we run the system for one year only because of actually, it took us quite a while to run it so didn't have time to do more assimilation. And we did a spin up here in two years. And then do I see these deep holes. So this is a composite plot for wind directions from southwest and you can nicely see in the vertical velocities that there is an upwelling pattern to the right of these clusters and then there is this down the downwelling pattern to the left or well more or less inside these clusters. And this is nicely in agreement with your unjust showed just for the whole area. There's these black polygons show the areas where we consider the wind talks. So it's a hypersatical scenario right now. If you change it over if you look at different wind directions these pattern changes so that's a good sign that this has been nicely covered by the model. So I've averaged that over the year. What are the impact on the overall system dynamics and here I looked at mixed layer dubs and current velocities. And for the mixed layer dubs I wasn't that surprised there was a shadowing general shadowing also makes layer since you kind of reduce the energy that's mixing the surface layer. And what I was really surprised of that you see general decrease in the residual currents almost everywhere in that area not only where you have so informed, but there are also still some areas where you actually see an increase and current velocities and then some areas that can amount to up to 10% of some current velocities. So that affects the ecosystem. While this on the left side you see representation of the prime production in the area, and you can nicely see the prime production is highest in these front title fronts. So this is a very typical situation in the North Sea, but you also see that many of the plant wind talks are situated in these frontal areas. So that would be expect the change to be and this is for the whole year, but you can actually see that they're actually pattern appearing, but they are not only located to where your clusters are structured but they're actually impacting the whole area. And we have a general decrease of private production in the situation in the regions where the clusters are, but there is an increase in the locations around these clusters here and also at the bank. So all areas that are very important and dynamic on the North Sea ecosystem and we expect that this might be actually playable also for higher trophics. This is I will not explain that very detailed but it also shows that in especially the stratified areas you would expect a vertical shift in your productivity related to these wind rakes of the system. So we have ecosystem variables we looked at where actually sediment biomass or biogenic carbon inside the sediment. And also here we see a redistribution mainly related to the changes in the bottom shear stress. So we saw that there is a stronger increase in sediment biomass and deeper areas where there is a bit of increase in sediment biomass in the deeper areas and decrease in sediment biomass and shallow areas. And what I thought was really most interesting was actually the dissolved oxygen in the bottom layer. Normally the North Sea is not an area that's very limited by oxygen, but here in this area at oyster grounds. There are certain areas that can become hypoxic during autumn, as it's like a trial where the system contains material. And that has also been shown before from moving data for example in oyster grounds on the sea and in autumn you have these very low oxygen situations. So we saw from the model that these low oxygen situations actually can be even more decreased, at least in the year we simulated. So, I just wanted to show once more this kind of change and prime production versus marine protected areas and I think it's important to keep in mind that the impacts we see from this large clusters of showing farms are not very, not local. The changes that can be expected in a large, in a much larger environment. Now the North Sea might be very special in that case, but maybe not what needs to be assessed, I guess. So the last part where I want to guide you very quickly through is these mixing in the ocean, which is somewhat different process, and actually quite interesting because it might actually compensate for some of the changes that come from the windwakes. These are both figures from a nice review paper from Robert Jarrell last year and this shows that kind of when the currents meets the piles that they kind of induce these kind of mixing and vortices in lee of these piles and they have carbon therapies just with us has a huge experience with that. And he hypothesized that that might kind of induce a neutral flux into the euphoric zone and that's increased productivity in the first time. So we started to look at this as well, again with the same unstructured grid system we have before implementing trying different things here. So trying different things here like using a direct implementation of these piles versus a direct parameterization that comes from simulations that Jeff's group have been doing. And then we wanted to see is the effect actually smaller than the windbakes, because we would expect while they're a bit smaller in space at least. And what we found was that this effect is actually the same order of magnitude as the effect that we expect for the windwakes. And here is the changes in current speed changes and the changes in stratification. And you see that for the current speed changes in fact we found also again decreased while the stratification changes actually the opposite to what we expect from the windwakes. So if I put that side by side here just to give a bit of an idea about this is the change in potential energy and not normally for the for the simulation with the atmospheric break versus the simulation. This is the simulation with the pile effect itself. And there you can see for the stratification it goes kind of in an opposite direction while for the current speed is a bit more complicated. And what the next step would be in the future is actually to combine these effect to see what's in that effect actually will be. So to summarize, we see that this after it comes out of the physical condition on that it results in large scale anomalies and not only very local anomalies. And we have an ecosystem response which is also large scale and tends to restructure the productivity in the system but also carbon sediments or bottom water oxygen are impacted. And it needs to be kept in mind that there are far field effects really far field effects that might, for example, impact other areas marine protected areas and that need to be assessed. Clearly, while considering these offshore in parks. There are also a lot of things that we don't know of course. Well, this is just a bit of a list. I did not set up recommendations here. But I think what what's a major recommendation is take keep in mind that there is not just the local fact that the whole thing will change and type play an important role. And yes, in terms of modeling clearly I also don't think that it's very, I mean, it's a special case important as your answer, but it's not the most important thing it just needs to be. Clearly the system needs to be clearly represented to cover these changes. Thanks so much. Apologies for the interaction. Fine. Thank you. Maybe we'll take one or two quick questions before moving to the next. Josh and then. Okay, yeah. Thank you for those those two related talks. My question is that you sh