Morro Bay

Morro Bay is the compact, sheltered Central Coast estuary tucked behind Morro Rock, at the southern edge of the project. It’s much smaller than Humboldt or Tomales, a few square miles of intertidal mudflat and shallow channels, but it’s a heavily-instrumented shoreline thanks to NOAA’s harbor presence, and it supports a small but productive oyster-grower community.

What we’re tracking

The Morro portion of the project pulls together public readings from:

• Offshore buoys: wave height, sea-surface temperature, and weather in the open coastal waters offshore.
• Sensors inside the bay: water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen at the limited number of fixed stations in the bay proper.
• Tide gauges: the NOAA Morro Bay station, one of the longest-running tide records on the Central Coast.
• Harmful-algae monitoring: weekly samples from the state’s CalHABMAP program, with the Cal Poly Pier samples nearby providing additional offshore context.
• River flow (a known gap): no working federal gauge currently measures the creeks feeding Morro Bay. The USGS stations on Chorro and Los Osos creeks exist on paper but record no readings, and the old Morro Creek gauge went quiet in 1978. Rainfall records are the planned stand-in for the freshwater signal until creek gauging returns.

The map below shows every public station feeding the project, plus an optional layer for the locations of the bay’s shellfish farms.

What comes next

Live readings and alerts are on the roadmap. For now, this page is about what’s being collected and why.