WATER TEMPERATURE collected from Commercial Lobster Traps in Gulf of Maine and Southern New England Shelf from 2001-05-01 to 2016-06-16 (NCEI Accession 0162412)

Dozens of New England lobstermen have been installing temperature sensors on their traps to record hourly values at fixed locations since 2001. These moorings are distributed primarily in the Gulf of Maine and, to a lesser amount, along the shelf edge of the Southern New England Bight in a range of water depths (1–300m). Variability associated with tidal, wind, seasonal, and inter-annual processes can be depicted at nearly all sites. Given the minimum cost required to deploy the instrumentation and the sustained interest of the fishermen, the initiative provides a means to collect data continuously and a strategy for monitoring environmental change on climatic time scales.