Collaboration type: ongoing collaboration for the integration of the CMSY stock assessment model with the DLM toolkit

About NOAA: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an American scientific agency within the United States Department of Commerce that focuses on the conditions of the oceans and the atmosphere. NOAA warns of dangerous weather, charts seas, guides the use and protection of ocean and coastal resources and conducts research to provide understanding and improve stewardship of the environment. In addition to its over 11,000 civilian employees, NOAA research and operations are supported by 321 uniformed service members who make up the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps. NOAA traces its history back to the convergence of multiple agencies: The United States Coastal and Geodetic Survey (founded in 1807), the Weather Bureau (1870) and the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries (1871). NOAA was officially formed in 1970.

Short description of the collaboration & main achievements in the period: As part of its mandate, NOAA is involved in stock assessments in US and international waters. Information on stocks is limited in many cases and is made up of catch and sometimes effort statistics. Furthermore, NOAA has monitoring activities based on weather and climate toolkits that in the marine science domain make use of information coming from stock assessment models. Among these, NOAA has selected the CMSY model (Froese et.al, 2017) as a possible candidate to be embedded in their DLM toolkit. CMSY is one of the models hosted as-a-Service by BlueBRIDGE and thus, together with NOAA experts, BlueBRIDGE has evaluated how it could be embedded in the DLM toolkit. In particular, the activity regarded the optimization of the process through the use of cloud computing and parallel processing and the evaluation of its performance when introduced in an ecosystem monitoring tool.

Plans for the future: This activity turned out to require much more effort due to the high complexity of the CMSY model and the time required by its execution. NOAA plans to explore other ways to optimize the model and to embed it in the DLM toolkit, possibly through dedicated funding.