The ERMA data release accompanied the Deepwater Horizon oil spill trustees' release of the Draft Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Programmatic Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan (PDARP) and Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS). This draft document outlines 15-year comprehensive, integrated environmental ecosystem restoration plans for the Gulf of Mexico in response to the April 20, 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion and spill. More than 1,200 new data layers were released to the public and all pre-existing public data layers were reviewed and updated as needed. This brings the total to more than 2,800 data layers available on ERMA Deepwater Gulf Response. Recently released data are referenced in 35 new ERMA bookmarks organized by draft restoration plan chapter and resource group (e.g. water column, sea turtles, etc.). Users can also use the "Recent Data" tab to find newly added data in ERMA.

In additional support of the draft restoration plan, the public can access and download more than 13 million searchable, standardized records from the oil spill response and damage assessment through NOAA's public data warehouse and query tool, Data Integration Visualization Exploration and Reporting (DIVER) Explorer. DIVER provides access to 20,000 data collection trips, over 100,000 observations of oiling and marsh conditions, oceanographic data, tracking of marine mammals and turtles, 2 million laboratory results, and over 600,000 photographs documenting environmental conditions and monitoring. See the NOAA Gulf Spill Restoration website for additional information and reports. For further information, please contact Amy Merten. Go back to OR&R Weekly Report.