PACE Data Hackweeks bring together student, early-career, and senior scientists to work hands-on with data from NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission. During two past events, participants collaborated in small teams to explore scientific questions, develop reproducible workflows, and gain experience working with large, cloud-hosted datasets. Leveraging community-supported cloud infrastructure, the hackweeks lowered technical barriers and emphasized modern tools, open-source practices, and FAIR data principles. The events fostered interdisciplinary collaboration and led to tangible outcomes, including new analyses, shared code, and ongoing collaborations. Overall, the PACE Data Hackweeks demonstrate that mission-focused hackweeks are an effective way to build community capacity and support adaptation to evolving data and computing environments.
Single beam sonars can provide valuable acoustic information on the structure of benthic habitats and the contents of the water column. Nominally, acoustic sensors that provide water column data in scientific applications can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. In contrast, consumer grade fish finders that are mass produced are very inexpensive, costing only tens or hundreds of dollars. Unlocking a fish finder for scientific use could increase access to low-cost sensing methods for coastal communities that are historically underserved. The principal challenge with using a fish finder for benthic habitat classification is that the sonars are generally not interoperable and are often limited to visualization on a display or chart plotter made by the sonar manufacturer. This vendor lock prevents the sonar data, and in particular water column data, from being stored and processed to create mapping products. In this project, “SonarPhony” was developed to provide interoperability software to enable the real-time visualization and logging of water column data from a low-cost fish finder. A machine learning approach was used to demonstrate that the logged data could be used to estimate bottom type and identify the presence of seagrasses. This solution thus provides a low-cost means for both benthic habitat classification and bathymetric mapping.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) redistributes heat, salt, oxygen, carbon, and nutrients in the Atlantic Ocean, providing warmth and moisture to the climate of northern Europe (Rhines and Häkkinen, 2003), displacing the Intertropical Convergence Zone northward of the equator (Ben-Yami et al., 2024), sequestering anthropogenic carbon in the deep ocean (Brown et al., 2021), and seeding the subpolar North Atlantic with sufficient nutrients to support the annual spring phytoplankton bloom (Williams et al., 2026). While models and proxies of the AMOC have been instrumental in understanding its past and future variability, large inter-model differences necessitate direct observations to provide a baseline from which to compare the models, as well as an unambiguous time series of recent AMOC variability. However, measuring a system as large and complex as the AMOC presents many challenges: spanning thousands of kilometers horizontally and covering full ocean depths, the AMOC is composed of currents that vary on daily to millennial time scales. Recirculating flows that can be an order of magnitude stronger than the AMOC itself further complicate observations.
Effective management of deep-sea ecosystems and the high seas is hindered by the absence of a globally consistent framework for characterizing benthic habitats. Here we present the first global ecological classification of the seafloor, comprising 250 unique ecological benthic units (EBUs), distributed on the seafloor as nearly 700,000 EBU polygon occurrences, generated by intersecting a high-resolution geomorphic map with multivariate environmental seascapes. Using 17 million seafloor data points and 0.05° resolution biophysical datasets—including bottom temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, carbon flux, sediment thickness, crustal age, and bottom currents—we identified 57 benthic regions across six major geomorphic groups (shelves, slopes, seamounts/guyots, spreading ridges, abyssal/hadal areas, plateaus). The resulting EBUs reveal previously unrecognized ecological gradients, quantify global patterns of benthic heterogeneity, and expose large-scale environmental vulnerabilities. Notably, we find that 95.6 million km2 (26% of the ocean area) of abyssal seafloor lies below the carbonate compensation depth, that 4.16 million km2 (1% of the ocean) of continental slopes intersect severe oxygen minima, and <1% of seamounts occur in seascapes most environmentally favorable to life. These insights provide a powerful basis for identifying rare habitat configurations, assessing exposure to climate-driven stressors, and prioritizing areas for high seas marine protected area planning, as well as a policy-relevant foundation for environmental impact assessment and biodiversity baseline proxies under the new United Nations High Seas Treaty.
Over the last two decades, there has been an explosion of oceanographic data from a broad array of ocean observing platforms, as well as dramatic improvements in the ability of ocean models to resolve processes across multiple temporal and spatial scales. Ocean researchers' ability to leverage computing tools and resources are key to effectively understanding and monitoring our ocean, the marine ecosystems it supports, and the response of the Earth system to climate change. Therefore, data science skills have become essential in the scientific discovery process, and it is becoming increasingly important to have computational skills in our research toolbox. OceanHackWeek was launched in 2018 to build an inclusive community that promotes data and software proficiency in oceanography. With a mission to meet, collaborate, and learn at the intersection of ocean and data sciences, OceanHackWeek provides a vibrant, diverse, and inclusive community that embodies the vision of an open ocean science future. In this article we present the OceanHackWeek model, provide an overview of the curriculum and formats of the events, and discuss the lessons learned and recommendations for implementing an OceanHackWeek-style event.
Widespread marine heatwaves (MHWs) affected Australia over the 2024/25 summer and autumn. They impacted marine species, ecosystems, and coastal communities, with emerging economic consequences. Across northern Australia, severe coral bleaching occurred for the first time along both the western and eastern coasts, and a mass fish kill occurred in Western Australia. In South Australia, prolonged MHW conditions and impacts from an extensive harmful algal bloom of the dinoflagellate Karenia included extensive fish kills, human health effects, losses for ocean-dependent industries, and currently unquantified effects on the broader marine ecosystem. In Tasmania, a range of impacts were linked to warm water, including blooms of salps, Noctiluca, and jellyfish. In New South Wales, a fish mortality event linked to thermal shock generated considerable community concern and media coverage. Trial seasonal forecasts available several months ahead of MHW emergence, combined with national marine climate briefings, helped prepare industry, researchers, and governments for possible impacts. This resulted in increased awareness and development of regional and industry MHW response plans with proactive strategies at both short and long timescales.
. In this work we provide pipelines for acquiring and processing Sea-Bird Scientific Spectral Absorption and Attenuation Sensor (ac-s) data through a high-level Python package. The raw streamed and converted instrument output is complex and requires several post-processing steps rooted in optical theory and empirical methods to create base products for algorithms that approximate biogeochemical properties and appeal to a broader oceanographic community. Datasets from the ac-s are becoming more available in public archives and in real time from large oceanographic infrastructure programs, thus it is important to establish uncomplicated software packages and interfaces that support the implementation of best practices and the distribution of accessible and intuitive data. acspype provides means to perform both instrument-intrinsic and human-in-the-loop corrections with flexibility and clear provenance following well-established manufacturer and research community guidelines. Core functions are provided that allow for the acquisition of realtime data and for post-processing archived datasets. As best practices continue to evolve, acspype would benefit from the addition of time-lag correction functions, methods for assessing instrument drift, and improved uncertainty estimation procedures.
In Antarctica's coastal waters, the seafloor hosts a surprisingly rich diversity of life, shaped by intricate interactions between sea ice and flora and faunal communities. As sea ice forms and melts seasonally, it modulates the availability of light to both the microscopic algae living within and beneath the ice itself (sympagic algae), and, in turn, influences the productivity and biodiver sity of the benthic ecosystems below. The complex pathways that connect sea ice dynamics with the benthos are particularly vulnerable to climate driven changes in sea ice cover. Understanding responses to a rapidly changing icescape, shaped by warming air and ocean conditions, is essential for predicting the future of benthic biodiversity and its ecosystem functions and services, including biogeochem ical cycling and carbon storage. Key to this understanding is coupling structural and biological observations across these mirrored eco systems. We describe a proofof concept under ice hyperspectral imaging platform, HIcyBot, that we deployed in the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area in 2023. HIcyBot is a remotely operated vehicle that leverages emerging sea ice biooptical models to quantify ice algae biomass and classifies fine scale seafloor features through integration of underwater hyperspectral imaging, stereophotogrammetry, and acoustic positioning. Through near simultaneous high resolution characterization of these under ice realms, the platform introduces a novel, spatially explicit approach to understanding how biodiversity and the ecosystem function beneath Antarctic sea ice and how they are responding to a changing icescape.
The overlapping missions of the NASA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite and NASA Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite provide the opportunity to observe oceanic biophysical interactions from space at unprecedented spatiotemporal scales. We use provisional datasets from these two cutting-edge missions to investigate subseasonal to seasonal variability in the microbial community compositions of subtropical mesoscale eddies. The results highlight the capacity of mesoscale eddies to act as transient ecological niches that restructure the surface marine microbial community. For the first time, the combination of SWOT and PACE enables space-based observations of plankton community composition alongside the physical processes that structure it.
Seamounts are underwater mountains with unique hydrodynamic properties that play a major role in supporting marine biodiversity and biological productivity. We explore how physical data, marine megafauna tracking, environmental parameters, and fisheries information can improve our understanding of these complex ecosystems. Abundant seabird tracking data from the Cabo Verde and Azores archipelagos make ideal case studies for exploring specific seamount characteristics that attract marine species, particularly seabirds, at fine scales. These case studies also provide a foundation for applying such approaches to identify areas of conservation importance. Multi-species predictive modeling is needed to identify the relationship between biological hotspots and seamount hydrodynamics, essential knowledge for developing effective marine conservation strategies. We propose six priority research directions to address knowledge gaps and inform conservation measures that protect these refuges of ocean biodiversity.
