Mission
The mission of NOAA’s CoastWatch is to provide timely access to near real-time satellite data to monitor, restore, and manage U.S. coastal ocean resources.
User Community
Our users include Federal, State, and local coastal resource managers, marine scientists, educators and the general public.
CoastWatch provides a wide range of satellite environmental data to support the work of coastal scientists and resource managers in all U.S. coastal waters. NOAA CoastWatch is organized into a Central Operations office and six Regional Nodes:
Central Operations - Central Operations, which is managed by NOAA's National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), coordinates the processing, delivery, quality control, and storage of data products.
Regional Nodes - Hosted at NOAA line offices located around the country, the distribution of the Regional Nodes allows for the development of satellite products and scientific expertise that are of regional importance.
• Great Lakes Regional Node
• Central Pacific Regional Node
• East Coast Regional Node
• Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico
• PolarWatch
• West Coast Regional Node
The CoastWatch West Coast Regional Node (WCRN) provides rapid dissemination of satellite observation data to governmental, academic, commercial, and public users. The WCRN was established in September 1995. It is hosted by NOAA Fisheries, Southwest Fisheries Science Center's Environmental Research Division. Presently, CoastWatch WCRN is housed at the Fisheries Ecology Division in Santa Cruz, CA.
The Environmental Research Division (ERD) of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center provides innovative science-based analyses, products, and information on environmental variability to meet the research and management needs of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, the National Marine Fisheries Service, and NOAA. The ERD conducts research on fishery-related effects of natural environmental variability over a broad range of scientific, management, and operational concerns of the government and the fishing industry. As a part of this work, the ERD develops and maintains an extensive database of environmental observations. The data activities of the CoastWatch WCRN are fully integrated with the data services provided by the ERD.