More than 30 scientists
will embark next week on a research mission to the Southern Ocean.
Researchers will battle the elements to study how gases important to
climate change move between the atmosphere and the ocean under high winds
and seas.
NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and
the National Science Foundation are sponsoring the Southern Ocean Gas
Exchange Experiment, a six-week research expedition aboard the NOAA ship
Ronald H. Brown, departing Feb. 28 from Punta Arenas, Chile. The Ronald H.
Brown is a state-of-the-art oceanographic research platform and the largest
research vessel in the NOAA fleet.
Scientists from dozens of universities and research institutions plan
to measure turbulence, waves, bubbles, temperature and ocean color, and
investigate how these factors relate to the air-sea exchange of carbon
dioxide and other climate-relevant gases. The research will help improve
the accuracy of climate models and predictions.
The world's oceans are estimated to absorb about 2 billion metric tons
of carbon from the atmosphere every year, which is about 30 percent of the
total annual global emissions of carbon dioxide. Scientists know higher
wind speeds promote faster exchange of gases, but there have been very few
studies aimed at directly measuring these exchanges under real world
conditions where other factors, such as breaking waves, can influence the
process.
"NASA's ongoing effort to understand the global carbon cycle will
benefit from the data this cruise will produce about the mechanisms that
govern gas transfer in this remote part of the world's ocean," said Paula
Bontempi, manager of NASA's ocean biology and biogeochemistry research
program at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "NASA's global satellite
observations of ocean color that reveal so much about the health of our
oceans also will be improved in this region as we validate what our
space-based sensors see with direct measurements taken at sea."
NASA's Aqua satellite makes ocean color observations over the Southern
Ocean every few days with the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer. The satellite, launched in 2002, uses six instruments to
make global measurements of the atmosphere, land, oceans, and snow and ice
cover.
The Southern Ocean covers a vast area and has some of the roughest seas
on Earth.
"It is the largest ocean region where the surface waters directly
connect to the ocean interior, providing a pathway into the deep sea for
carbon dioxide released from human activities," said Christopher Sabine, an
oceanographer at NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle,
and co-chief scientist on the cruise. "Understanding how atmospheric carbon
dioxide is absorbed into these cold surface waters under high winds speeds
is important for determining how the ocean uptake of carbon dioxide will
respond to future climate change."
"We will be directly assessing the rate and mechanism by which the
ocean is taking up carbon and releasing it," said cruise co-chief scientist
David Ho of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University,
Palisades, N.Y. "This is the first U.S.-led effort to use all the
state-of-the-art tools that we have to quantify gas exchange in the
Southern Ocean. After years of planning, it is extremely satisfying to see
the experiment finally take place."
Source: Nasa
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