Despite the recognized importance of the ocean on the terrestrial and coastal environmental conditions, critical data and process-based environmental intelligence to support management decisions in areas of national importance is lacking. Stakeholder engagement has revealed that, in key regions, we lack critical “baselines” of important oceanographic variables, such as temperature, salinity and ocean acidity. These baseline data form a foundation of monitoring that underpins the expert ocean intelligence that informs management decisions. However, the lack of an oceanographic “baseline” does not stem wholly from a lack of available observations, but also from an underutilization of existing observations and lack of synthesis. This is particularly true over the shallower continental shelf and coastal regions, where Argo floats cannot operate.
We will present preliminary results of a project to provide a high quality, detailed regional ocean “Atlas” to empower decision-making and respond to the needs of society. This project will modernize the well-known CSIRO Atlas of Regional Seas (CARS), last updated in 2009, by taking advantage of modern oceanographic observations and developments in software engineering and machine learning. The project will synthesize measurements to create a 3-dimensional “atlas” of oceanographic properties around Australia, including shallower regions on the continental shelf