A plan to finish mapping the Pacific U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone

Program offices throughout NOAA are interested in mapping US waters across the Pacific Ocean; we present here a detailed estimate of the time required to map this area. With a limited number of properly outfitted mapping vessels, and an increasing number of collaborative projects, level of effort estimates is crucial to sea day allocation and big picture decision making. Using a model-based approach created by NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey (Coast Survey) (Greenaway et al., 2019)— based on the proportion of survey coverage to water depth, and survey efficiency — we computed the estimated level of effort required to finish mapping the unmapped areas in the Pacific U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (Figure 1), and include them in this report.