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The Northeastern Regional Association of Coastal Ocean Observing Systems (NERACOOS), which began in 2008, includes the University of Maine’s comprehensive data buoy array in the Gulf of Maine (GoM). The University of Maine buoy system started in 2001 as part of the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS). The buoys provide a wide variety of oceanographic and marine meteorological data in real time to scientists, environmentalists, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Coast Guard and Canadian Coast Guard, educators, regional natural resource managers, the GoM fishing and maritime industries, and the general public. The GoM observing system is presently undergoing a redesign of the buoy control system to enhance remote access and reduce operational costs. The enhancements will allow remote trouble-shooting and reprogramming of the buoys and subsurface sensors. The system will also accommodate sensors from other research groups and allow them post-deployment control without assistance from our buoy group.Over the near-decade of operation, the system has revealed marked seasonal and interannual variability of the circulation and physical properties of the GoM. In the fall of 2004 to spring of 2005, Doppler currents measured an outflow of deep salty slope waters that suggest a regime shift in the inflow and outflow of transports through the Northeast Channel. During the same period, a salinity anomaly event lowered salinity throughout the GoM by roughly 2 psu by the winter of 2005. In following years, the previously unusual slope outflow and reduced salinity have often reoccurred.

This paper presents capabilities of the EventViewer, a graphical user interface for visualizing and exploring patterns in events. The EventViewer supports queries on events stored in an events database and exploration of various temporal and spatial patterns in events. Interactions in the EventViewer interface allow users to select events from the database, assign spatial, temporal and thematic categories to graphic display elements called bands, stacks, and panels which causes events to be displayed according to their associations with the user selected categories. The spatial, temporal and thematic categories can be rearranged among the bands, stacks and panels thus changing the view of events and causing different patterns to become apparent. The EventViewer support exploration of periodic patterns, spatial and temporal trends, and event-event relationships. The EventViewer functionality is illustrated with oceanographic events extracted from the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing system sensor data. Events are extracted from multiple time series variables collected at a number of locations and depths in the Gulf of Maine.