RFR-LME Ocean Acidification Indicators from 1998 to 2023 (NCEI Accession 0287551)

This dataset consists of Gridded monthly data products of surface ocean acidification indicators from 1998 to 2023 and on a 0.25° by 0.25° spatial grid have been developed for eleven U.S. Large Marine Ecosystems (LMEs) using a machine learning algorithm called random forest regression (RFR). The data products are called RFR-LMEs, and were constructed using observations from the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas — co-located with surface ocean properties from various satellite, reanalysis, and observational products — with an approach that utilized two types of machine learning algorithms: (1) Gaussian mixture models to cluster the data into subregions with similar environmental variability and (2) RFRs that were trained and applied separately in each cluster to interpolate the observational data in space and time. RFR-LMEs also rely on previously published seawater property estimation routines to obtain the full suite of ocean acidification indicators. The products show a domain-wide carbon dioxide partial pressure increase of 1.6 ± 0.4 μatm yr−1 and pH decrease of 0.0015 ± 0.0004 yr−1. More information on the creation and validation of RFR-LMEs is available in the following publication: Sharp, J.D., Jiang, L., Carter, B.R., Lavin, P.D., Yoo, H., Cross, S.L., 2024. A mapped dataset of surface ocean acidification indicators in large marine ecosystems of the United States. Scientific Data, 11, 715, 10.1038/s41597-024- 03530-7.