Abstract
The National Academies Consensus Study Report, Potential Hydrodynamic Impacts of Offshore Wind Energy on Nantucket Shoals Regional Ecology: An Evaluation from Wind to Whales (NASEM, 2024), is important, timely, and succinct. During this time of political and financial uncertainty regarding the development of offshore wind, this report, summarized by Hofmann et al. (2025, in this issue), offers clear directions for the research needed to resolve significant scientific and engineering questions during a time of rapid change in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean.
The report highlights the difficulty of unraveling the impacts of offshore wind development from oceanographic variability. The Northwest Atlantic is one of the most rapidly warming regions in the world ocean (e.g., Pershing et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2020; Seidov et al., 2021), resulting in a trend of increasing stratification in the region (Harden et al., 2020). While there is a longer-term warming trend, in part relating to variability upstream (e.g., Gonçalves Neto et al., 2021), extreme events, such as marine heatwaves in the region, have resulted in large temperature anomalies over time periods from days to months. Further complicating the matter, the spatial scales of the marine heatwaves depend on whether they result from atmospheric forcing or ocean advection (e.g., Chen et al., 2014; Großelindemann et al., 2022).