An Estuary in Real Time: Hatfield’s Coastal Monitoring Station
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The Coastal Monitoring Station (CMS), located at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center (HMSC) in Newport OR, began collecting and transmitting water quality data in real-time in March 2025. The CMS includes space and infrastructure for core in situ instrumentation, benchtop sampling instruments, and an innovation test berth. Although measurements have been taken at this dock site in the Yaquina estuary since 1988, funding for maintenance, calibration, and data curation has been sporadic. This changed in 2021 when the Oregon legislature funded efforts to improve Oregon’s ocean acidification and hypoxia (OAH) monitoring. These funds were administered through the Oregon Ocean Science Trust for HMSC to establish a robust, long-term OAH monitoring site on the HMSC campus. The CMS is modular, and began with physical, chemical, and biological water sampling instruments; air quality and meteorological packages also will be added in 2025. User groups for the station include researchers, resource managers, recreational and commercial users of the estuary, and the general public. Users have access to real-time data and a growing time series database on a publicly accessible repository. HMSC is working to increase data literacy and public engagement in water quality issues through the CMS website, a new CMS-based K-12 SeaGrant curriculum, and a public exhibit in the Hatfield Visitor Center. The CMS has leveraged CORIOLIX, a standardized platform for instrumentation and real-time data visualization based on the Regional Class Research Vessel model. This system could inform best practices and data format uniformity for an expanding network of marine station observatories.