The 91探花 is among leading U.S. oceanographic institutions that have received National Science Foundation funding to build and deploy 500 robotic ocean-monitoring floats to monitor the chemistry and biology of the world鈥檚 oceans.

The National Science Foundation on October 29 approved a $53 million, five-year grant to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI); the UW; Scripps Institution of Oceanography; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Princeton University. The consortium will build robotic ocean-monitoring floats to be distributed in oceans around the globe.

鈥淭his will be one of the largest awards that NSF has ever given in ocean sciences,鈥� said , a 91探花professor of oceanography. 鈥淚t will allow us to create and deploy an ocean observing system that will operate for decades and will influence our ideas about the carbon cycle, in the same way that the basic Argo program has helped our understanding of the physics of ocean circulation.鈥�

About $20.5 million of the award will go to the 91探花to build and deploy about 300 of the 500 floats, with another $3 million for maintenance. The 91探花team plans to begin construction in 2021 and hopes to put the first instruments in the water later that year. The new instruments are similar to roughly 200 the 91探花team previously built to survey the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, though these won鈥檛 have under-ice capabilities.

This new network of floats, called the , or GO-BGC Array, will collect observations of ocean chemistry and biology from the surface to a depth of 2 kilometers, or 1.24 miles. When the floats rise every nine days to the surface they will transmit data that will be made freely available to the public within a day of being collected for use by researchers, educators and policymakers around the world.

鈥淭hese observations will provide an unprecedented global view of ocean processes that determine carbon cycling, ocean acidification, deoxygenation and biological productivity 鈥� all of which have a critical impact on marine ecosystems and the climate of our planet,鈥� said , a 91探花assistant professor of oceanography.

These data will allow scientists to pursue fundamental questions about ocean ecosystems, observe ecosystem health and productivity, and monitor the elemental cycles of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in the ocean through all seasons of the year. Such essential data are needed to improve computer models of ocean fisheries and climate, and to monitor and forecast the effects of ocean warming and ocean acidification on sea life.

Although scientists can use Earth-orbiting platforms and research vessels to monitor the ocean, satellites can only monitor near-surface waters, and the small global fleet of open-ocean research ships can only remain at sea for so long. As a result, ocean-health observations only cover a tiny fraction of the ocean at any given time, leaving huge ocean regions unvisited for decades, or longer.

A single robotic float costs the same as two days at sea on a research ship. But floats can collect data autonomously for over five years, in all seasons 鈥� including during winter storms, when shipboard work is limited.

Since 2014 the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling () program has deployed an array of robotic 鈥渂iogeochemical鈥� floats, based on the design, but carrying sensors to monitor the chemical and biological properties of the ocean. SOCCOM floats have operated for nearly six years in the remote, stormy, and often ice-covered Southern Ocean鈥攁rguably one of the harshest marine environments on Earth. These floats have already provided critical new information about how the Southern Ocean interacts with the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere and winter sea ice.

Similar to the SOCCOM floats, the new GO-BGC floats will carry several sensors in addition to the core Argo sensors for temperature, depth and salinity. These include instruments to measure oxygen concentration, pH (ocean acidity), nitrate (an essential nutrient for microscopic algae), sunlight (required for algal growth), chlorophyll (an indicator of algal populations) and particles in the water (including microscopic algae). Over the last few years, researchers have been testing, refining and calibrating these sensitive instruments as part of the SOCCOM program and other international efforts.

MBARI will coordinate the project, refine the sensors, take the lead in processing data from the floats, and do outreach for the program. Oceanographers at the UW, Scripps and the Woods Hole will build and deploy floats in collaboration with commercial partners. Researchers at Princeton University will contribute to the array design and project management, and ensure that the data are linked to global computer models of the Earth鈥檚 ocean and climate.

A broad public outreach program, including workshops, web-based curricula and hands-on activities will help scientists, teachers, students and others use the data. In an expansion of the existing SOCCOM program, the floats will be adopted by elementary- to college-level classes. Student activities will be developed through a partnership with the national program. Courses based on GO-BGC technology will also be offered through the , a makerspace at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The researchers hope that GO-BGC will inspire other countries to contribute similarly instrumented floats, as part of the new global biogeochemical Argo effort. Ideally, this expanded network will grow to a sustained array of 1,000 biogeochemical floats uniformly distributed around the world鈥檚 oceans, and spaced about 620 miles, or 1,000 kilometers, apart from each other.

鈥淯ntil now, biogeochemical data has not been collected for the vast majority of the world鈥檚 ocean. GO-BGC will transform our ability to observe and understand the chemical and biological cycles that are the foundation of marine food webs,鈥� said principal investigator Ken Johnson, a marine chemist at MBARI.

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For more information, contact Riser at riser@uw.edu or Gray at argray@uw.edu.

Adapted from an MBARI .

The winter ice on the surface of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea occasionally forms an enormous hole. A hole that appeared in 2016 and 2017 drew from scientists and reporters. Though even bigger gaps had formed decades before, this was the first time oceanographers had a chance to truly monitor the unexpected gap in Antarctic winter sea ice.

A new study led by the 91探花 combines satellite images of the sea ice cover, robotic drifters and even seals outfitted with sensors to better understand the phenomenon. The research explores why this hole appears in only some years, and what role it could play in the larger ocean circulation.

The was published June 10 in the journal .

“We thought this large hole in the sea ice 鈥� known as a polynya 鈥� was something that was rare, maybe a process that had gone extinct. But the events in 2016 and 2017 forced us to reevaluate that,” said lead author , a 91探花doctoral student in oceanography. “Observations show that the recent polynyas opened from a combination of factors 鈥� one being the unusual ocean conditions, and the other being a series of very intense storms that swirled over the Weddell Sea with almost hurricane-force winds.”

A “polynya,” a Russian word that roughly means “hole in the ice,” can form near shore as wind pushes the ice around. But it can also appear far from the coast and stick around for weeks to months, where it acts as an oasis for penguins, whales and seals to pop up and breathe.

This particular spot far from the Antarctic coast often has small openings and has seen large polynyas before. The biggest known polynyas at that location were in 1974, 1975 and 1976, just after the first satellites were launched, when an area the size of New Zealand remained ice-free through three consecutive Antarctic winters despite air temperatures far below freezing.

Campbell joined the 91探花as a graduate student in 2016 to better understand this mysterious phenomenon. In a stroke of scientific luck, a big one appeared for the first time in decades. A NASA in August 2016 drew public attention to a 33,000-square-kilometer (13,000-square-mile) gap that appeared for three weeks. An even bigger gap, of 50,000 square kilometers (19,000 square miles) appeared in September and October of 2017.

The Southern Ocean is thought to play a key role in global ocean currents and carbon cycles, but its behavior is poorly understood. It hosts some of the fiercest storms on the planet, with winds whipping uninterrupted around the continent in the 24-hour darkness of polar winter. The new study used observations from the project, or SOCCOM, which puts out instruments that drift with the currents to monitor Antarctic conditions.

The study also used data from the long-running Argo ocean observing program, back to shore, weather stations and decades of satellite images.

“This study shows that this polynya is actually caused by a number of factors that all have to line up for it to happen,” said co-author , a 91探花professor of oceanography. “In any given year you could have several of these things happen, but unless you get them all, then you don’t get a polynya.”

The study shows that when winds surrounding Antarctica draw closer to shore, they promote stronger upward mixing in the eastern Weddell Sea. In that region, an underwater mountain known as Maud Rise forces dense seawater around it and leaves a spinning vortex above. Two SOCCOM instruments were trapped in the vortex above Maud Rise and recorded years of observations there.

Analysis shows that when the surface ocean is especially salty, as seen throughout 2016, strong winter storms can set off an overturning circulation. Warmer, saltier water from the depths gets churned up to the surface, where air chills it and makes it denser than the water below. As that water sinks, relatively warmer deep water of about 1 degree Celsius (34 F) replaces it, creating a feedback loop where ice can’t reform.

Under climate change, fresh water from melting glaciers and other sources will make the Southern Ocean’s surface layer less dense, which might mean fewer polynyas in the future. But the new study questions that assumption. Many models show that the winds circling Antarctica will become stronger and draw closer to the coast 鈥� the new paper suggests this would encourage more polynyas to form, not fewer.

These are the first observations to prove that even a smaller polynya like the one in 2016 moves water from the surface all the way to the deep ocean.

“Essentially it’s a flipping over of the entire ocean, rather than an injection of surface water on a one-way trip from the surface to the deep,” said co-author , who recently completed his doctorate in oceanography at the UW.

One way that a surface polynya matters for the climate is for the deepest water in the oceans, known as Antarctic Bottom Water. This cold, dense water lurks below all the other water. Where and how it’s created affects its characteristics, and would have ripple effects on other major ocean currents.

“Right now people think most of the bottom water is forming on the Antarctic shelf, but these big offshore polynyas might have been more common in the past,” Riser said. “We need to improve our models so we can study this process, which could have larger-scale climate implications.”

Large and long-lasting polynyas can also affect the atmosphere, because deep water contains carbon from lifeforms that have sunk over centuries and dissolved on their way down. Once this water reaches the surface that carbon could be released.

“This deep reservoir of carbon has been locked away for hundreds of years, and in a polynya it might get ventilated at the surface through this really violent mixing,” Campbell said. “A large carbon outgassing event could really whack the climate system if it happened multiple years in a row.”

Other co-authors on the paper are at the University of Toronto, who was the 2016-17 Canada Fulbright Visiting Chair in Arctic Studies at the UW; at the University of South Carolina; and and from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. SOCCOM is funded by the National Science Foundation. Campbell was supported by the U.S. Department of Defense through the National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellowship program. Additional funding is from the NSF, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the 91探花 and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

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For more information, contact Campbell at ethancc@uw.edu and 224-388-0301, Riser at riser@uw.edu and 206-543-1187 or Wilson at earlew@uw.edu.

NSF: PLR-1425989; NOAA: NA15OAR4320063

Around the planet’s oceans, nearly 4,000 floats 鈥� many of them built at the 91探花 鈥� are plunging up and down, collecting and transmitting observations of the world’s oceans.

This fall, one of these diving robots made the program’s , reporting temperature and salinity recorded to a depth of about a mile.

The is a 20-year-old project to gather 3D data on the oceans. The U.S. program is part of an with 26 countries that operate floats throughout the planet’s waters.

“When we started in 1999, no one would have even considered the 2 million profile milestone,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography. “In the beginning there was some question about whether the instruments would even work well enough to do this. We were just hoping it would work for the first few years.”

The 91探花has manufactured between one third and one half of the U.S. floats now in use, Riser said, which account for about half the international total. So the 91探花has manufactured about a fifth or a sixth of the world’s supply.

The 91探花manufactures roughly 110 floats per year that get deployed around the planet. Two undergraduates work in the lab and three graduate students are working with the data. Of this year’s 91探花floats, two-thirds were destined for the South Pacific and the other third are going to Antarctica.

Scientists say the nearly 20-year-old robotic fleet has transformed oceanography: Satellites track information only from the ocean’s surface, while ship-based observations are expensive and see only a small snapshot.

“Not to be too hyperbolic, but Argo has really revolutionized physical oceanography,” said , an assistant professor of oceanography. “I think it’s been one of the largest successes of any observational program of its kind.”

The cylindrical robots, about the size of a large rolled-up poster, dive down to a depth of 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) to drift with currents, then later sink down to 2 kilometers. After 10 days below the surface they adjust their buoyancy and gather data on the upward trip. Once at the surface, an antenna beams data back to computers onshore. A single battery lets the robot explore unaided for four to five years.

“One of the most important practical uses for the data is in weather forecasting, in that the data that we get from Argo have significantly improved weather forecasts and marine forecasting around the world,” Gray said. “But scientists are interested in the data to understand the processes that are controlling the ocean, and how the ocean impacts the climate system.”

More than 4,000 scientific papers and 275 doctoral theses have been written using Argo data. Observations are uploaded to the internet every three hours and are then available for free for anyone to use.

“That’s become the norm, the real-time availability of data,” Riser said. “But that was not the norm when we started in 2000.”

In the future, and floats will travel deeper and measure more things than the original devices. Both are in small-scale prototype mode now, Riser said, and researchers hope to secure funding for a larger-scale deployment. In addition to temperature and salinity these can measure ocean pH, oxygen, nitrate, chlorophyll found in microscopic algae, and light penetration.

While the existing Argo array helps to understand the movement of heat in the oceans, the newer technology will explore the deep ocean and help track the movement of carbon, which is the other half of the climate puzzle, Riser said.

“In coming years, it will be really important to maintain the core array, the high-quality data that’s coming in, but also to expand into these new areas: sensors that can measure new variables, and technology that lets us go into deeper water or even into coastal regions,” Gray said.

The 91探花has already been as part of a dedicated project to study the ocean around Antarctica. A global Argo version would be similar, Riser said, but without the ice-avoidance capabilities.

“The biogeochemical floats will be a whole different set of results that we can’t even imagine right now,” Riser said. “It won’t just be the heat part of the ocean cycle, it will be the carbon cycle. There’s a tremendous amount to learn.”

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For more information, contact Gray at argray@uw.edu or 206-543-0593 or Riser at riser@uw.edu or 206-543-1187.

The water circling Antarctica has some of the roughest, most dangerous conditions on the planet. This water also is crucially important to Earth’s climate: It stores a massive amount of carbon dioxide, supports vast communities of marine life and connects to all the major ocean basins.

To learn how these waters work, 91探花 oceanographers are sending robots to monitor conditions too dangerous or expensive for research ships to visit regularly.

“The Southern Ocean is taking up a sizable fraction of all the atmospheric CO2 that goes into the ocean. But we know very little about the Southern Ocean, especially under the ice,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography.

His group has built Argo ocean-monitoring floats since 1999, and still builds about 120 per year for several international efforts. The hardy, low-power robots cruise through the world’s oceans collecting observations, what The New York Times a few years ago called “.” The Seattle group is now in the middle of its toughest mission yet.

In 2014 the 91探花joined a $21 million, six-year National Science Foundation-funded to build more robots specifically to study the Southern Ocean. The Southern Ocean SOCCOM floats are broader and longer, and include biogeochemical sensors to measure oxygen, pH, chlorophyll and nitrate to track ocean acidification, carbon uptake and the massive subsurface plankton blooms that are key to marine ecosystems.

The SOCCOM robots have novel algorithms to avoid ice floes. When conditions allow they will pop up, every 10 days or more, and transmit data back to shore.

“It takes about one day to build a standard Argo float. A SOCCOM float takes more like one week,” Riser said. This also quadruples the construction costs. But even if it were smooth sailing to do research near Antarctica, these floats would be a bargain.

“We can put these things out in the hundreds and it still doesn’t cost as much as doing the work from ships,” Riser said.

He was aboard a in January to deploy a dozen UW-built SOCCOM floats off Antarctica. These are new-generation floats that use lithium batteries and are expected to collect data 24/7 for about six years. When they are able to bob to the surface and transmit, their data will be available on public servers within a day.

“Many of the floats have now disappeared under the seasonal Antarctic ice, and we likely won’t hear from them until mid-January,” Riser said.

So far the 91探花team has built 90 SOCCOM floats, roughly halfway to the 185 to 200 total that are expected to be in the water by 2020. Almost all the floats for the , which is based at Princeton University, are being built at the UW. The next batch will be deployed in September, during the Southern Hemisphere spring, from a ship that will sail from South Africa.

The floats will monitor a region that is poorly understood even as it’s changing rapidly. For example, the Larsen-C ice shelf recently off West Antarctica. While this won’t affect sea level, since the shelf was already floating, its absence changes the geography of the region and alters forces on the surrounding ice sheet.

SOCCOM floats are designed to spend long stretches operating under sea ice, but instructions command them to stick to deeper water, not the hazardous shallow areas near an ice shelf. As a result, no SOCCOM floats were near the Larsen-C ice shelf when it cracked. But as the ice shelf drifts and melts, the floats may detect the freshwater melting signal in summer months, Riser said.

On a recent trip to the lab in the 91探花Ocean Sciences Building, dozens of floats were in various stages of construction. The team was preparing for its largest shipment of the year, a 47-float delivery to New Zealand, where an annual cruise has been dropping UW-built floats since 2003. Two of those will be the more expensive SOCCOM floats. The team’s second-largest shipment of the year, of 28 floats, will be to Sydney, Australia, in early September.

Most of the Argo floats built at the 91探花and the other leading U.S. lab, at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, are destined for the Southern Hemisphere. That’s where the biggest data gap exists, Riser said, and where there is the most opportunity to learn.

But while many Southern Hemisphere instruments fill a scientific hole, the Antarctic oceanography is truly at the frontier. When his students and other researchers publish papers that use data collected in the Southern Ocean, Riser said: “You really can’t miss 鈥� it’s all new.”

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For more information, contact Riser at riser@uw.edu or 206-543-1187, or lab manager Dana Swift at swift@ocean.washington.edu or 206-543-6697.

A 91探花 oceanographer is chief scientist on a voyage in the waters around Antarctica as part of a major effort to monitor the Southern Ocean.

, a 91探花professor of oceanography, embarked Dec. 24 as part of the , or SOCCOM, project to collect better data about the planet’s most remote ocean.

The expedition is two thirds of the way through a month-long voyage from Punta Arenas in southern Chile to McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Along the way, researchers are deploying as part of the six-year, $21-million National Science Foundation effort. The multi-institutional project, based at Princeton University, will gather detailed observations of the Southern Ocean to understand its role in the global climate.

In a Dec. 26 post on his blog, “,” Riser wrote, “This morning the ship is surfing the waves, being pushed by a wind of nearly 50 knots, and the captain has prohibited us from working on deck until the wind subsides.” He then added, “There will likely come a time when we’ll all be exhausted, but for now there is no shortage of energy and camaraderie.”

He reported this week that the cruise continues to go well. The team has successfully deployed 10 of the 12 SOCCOM floats, as well as four regular UW-built Argo sensors. All the instruments are working and beaming back data.

The last two SOCCOM floats, Riser said, “will be more difficult and higher-risk, as we are entering the Ross Sea, and the ice maps show very high ice concentrations and lots of bergs.”

The ship has seen plenty of sea so far, he said, but nothing compared to what it will encounter in the Ross Sea, a deep bay between East and West Antarctica.

“Sea ice like this can be hazardous to the floats, but they do have an ice-avoidance algorithm that has protected them so far. We’ll see if it is up to the challenge of drifting pack ice in the Ross Sea,” Riser wrote.

Climate Central sent science communicator Greta Shum and photographer Ted Blanco to post updates from the ship. Shum hosted a Dec. 29 with the science team. She conducted an with Riser Jan. 3 on the ship’s deck:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeLg3yE5gnY

, a research scientist with the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory, is also on board for a separate research project. For additional updates, read the official cruise , read researcher blogs by and , a 91探花alumnus now at the University of Rhode Island, or follow SOCCOM updates on , and .

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For more information, contact Riser at 206-543-1187 or riser@ocean.washington.edu. Until Jan. 21, contact Riser at stephen.riser.guest@nbp.usap.gov.

The Southern Ocean, or the seawater that encircles Antarctica, soaks up half of the carbon emitted by humans and is thought to have absorbed much of the planet’s excess heat in recent decades. Yet, the inner workings 鈥� and global importance 鈥� of the waters that account for 30 percent of the world’s ocean area remain relatively unknown to scientists, as observations are hindered by dangerous seas.

The U.S. National Science Foundation this week a $21 million project to measure and model this region’s role in the climate. The six-year program is headquartered at Princeton University. The 91探花is one of 10 partner institutions.

“The goal of this project is to understand the uptake of carbon, specifically carbon dioxide, in the Southern Ocean,” said , a 91探花professor of oceanography. “I hope we can understand that better and see exactly where that’s happening, and why.”

Central to the project are roughly 200 floats, nearly all to be built in the UW’s Ocean Sciences Building. The will build the instruments from commercially-available components and add research sensors, checking the performance and testing each instrument in the lab and at sea.

The 91探花lab already has built more than 1,400 similar floats for the program, an effort to equip the world’s oceans with mechanical swimmers that can plunge 1 mile below the surface while recording temperature, salinity and ocean currents. Almost one-third of the instruments deployed since 2001 for the international Argo program were built at the UW.

The earlier Argo floats focused mainly on the physics of the seawater. The new model adds biological and chemical monitoring.

“These floats are much more complicated because of this,” Riser said. “The nitrate sensor in particular was more complicated than other floats we’ve built.”

The sensors to be deployed in the Southern Ocean will record oxygen, nitrogen, acidity, chlorophyll and carbon, which will help measure the growth of tiny organisms thought to help soak up carbon from the air.

These new floats will increase the monthly data from the Southern Ocean by 10 to 30 times compared to present levels, said principal investigator at Princeton.

“The scarcity of observations in the Southern Ocean and inadequacy of earlier models, combined with its importance to the Earth’s carbon and climate systems, means there is tremendous potential for groundbreaking research in this region,” Sarmiento said.

The first cold-water test of the new mechanical explorers took place in January during an eight-week cruise south of Australia. , a 91探花graduate student in oceanography, deployed 12 instruments for a successful test run.

In early October the first 16 floats to be deployed as part of the new project will be shipped to Cape Town, South Africa. Those instruments will be released in December by a German ship, the Polarstern, conducting research in the Weddell Sea.

“It’s exciting that it’s starting pretty soon now,” Riser said. “Three months from now these will be bobbing around in the Southern Ocean.”

The project will deploy 25 or 30 more instruments each year for the next six years. When the instruments surface they will beam back data to a publicly accessible database.

The project is funded by the NSF’s Division of Polar Programs, with additional support from NOAA and NASA. Other partners are Oregon State University; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the University of California, San Diego; Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; the University of Maine; Rutgers University; the University of Arizona; the University of Miami; and Climate Central, a journalism nonprofit based in Princeton.

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For more information, contact Riser at 206-543-1187 or riser@ocean.washington.edu. Riser is in Princeton for a project meeting and will be back at the 91探花on Friday, Sept. 12.

• Three-week cruise starts Feb. 25
• Follow along on the

With winter quarter in full swing and many students spending long hours in the library or the lab, a group of undergraduates will leave the coast of Japan for an unusually ambitious research and teaching expedition.

They leave Monday (Feb. 25) and will travel for about three weeks, flying back to Seattle in mid-March. It’s part of a senior-level course, , that will induct 11 seniors into the 91探花tradition of ship-based undergraduate research.

“The students are going to find out exactly what oceanographers do, and they’re either going to like it or not,” said instructor , a 91探花professor of oceanography. “For sure, it’s going to be something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

Emerson and fellow instructor and oceanography professor are chief scientists on one of the UW’s most far-flung undergraduate cruises.

In previous years, students have gone on research cruises off the coast of Washington, Vancouver Island and between Seattle and Hawaii. Last year’s combined research and teaching cruise took place off the coast of Chile.

This year’s goal is to study the Pacific equivalent to the Gulf Stream, known as the Kuroshio Current, which flows northward along the coast of Japan. It’s known that the fast current absorbs unusually high quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the reason is a mystery.

91探花faculty and graduate students hope to understand what role organisms play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they can improve computer models that try to predict how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect the climate.

Four scientists and three graduate students will conduct their own research while assisting the undergraduates.

Students will carry out collecting data to study water movement, acidity, and the relationship between satellite imagery and abundance of marine plant and animal life. Their research will become senior-level theses, and in some cases could lead to scientific publications.

“It鈥檚 one thing to sit in class and learn the theory, or even help with someone else’s research,” said Mariela Tuquero, a 91探花oceanography senior from Tacoma. “It’s another thing to have your own project that you care about, to be getting data that鈥檚 personal to you and interpreting the results.”

She said she’s excited, but also a little nervous 鈥� she has packed a box of Dramamine to help with seasickness.

Students begin in fall quarter learning about field research and designing their projects. In winter quarter they collect data and in the spring they will interpret that data, write a paper and present their findings.

During this year’s cruise 91探花researchers will deploy 18 built in Riser’s lab, which will join more than 3,000 that already measure temperature and salinity in the top half mile of the world鈥檚 oceans. These new floats include sensors fine-tuned by 91探花faculty and graduate students to precisely measure the amount of dissolved oxygen, which helps to detect the rate of photosynthesis.

Within a few hours of deployment, the new floats will begin to dive down, gradually rise to the surface, and beam data back to the UW. By this time next year the team will have a full year’s cycle of vertical profiles collected every 10 days. The floats will continue to collect data for about five years, until their batteries die and they sink to the ocean floor.

“Studying oxygen gives us some information about biological productivity,” Emerson said. “By March 2014 these floats will generate 18 annual cycles in different areas of the Kuroshio Current off of Japan.”

The cruise will take place on a Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel because the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel has been undergoing repairs. The research portion of the cruise is supported by the National Science Foundation. The student ship time is supported by the State of Washington, through an agreement that brought the Thompson to the 91探花in 1991 in exchange for 40 days each summer of ship-based undergraduate research.

“I think it鈥檚 one of the greatest opportunities I鈥檝e had at the university,” Tuquero said.

The only global-ocean climate-monitoring system 鈥� comprised of satellites and specialized floats 鈥� passed a milestone earlier this month when a 91探花and Scripps Institution of Oceanography expedition was in a position to deploy Argo float No. 3,000.

“Argo, in conjunction with satellites, is the best global-scale observation system we’ve ever had and probably will be for at least the next decade,” says Stephen Riser, 91探花professor of oceanography. He was among the earliest organizers of the program to deploy 3,000 floats in the deep waters of the world’s oceans.

Since the project’s launch in 2000, Riser’s 91探花team has received $24 million in funding and has been responsible for building and deploying nearly 20 percent of all the Argo floats. Only U.S. partner Scripps and the country of Japan have deployed as many.

Argo floats measure temperature and salinity 鈥� often called the vital signs of the ocean. Those measurements in recent years have been used around the world to improve seasonal climate forecasts and refine climate models. Some countries in the 22-nation Argo network 鈥� including Ecuador and Kenya, two of the newest members 鈥� want the ocean data for their fisheries management models, Riser says. The measurements also will help scientists and policy makers understand how the oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat from global warming during the past 50 years.

In seven years of launching Argo floats, the 91探花team is the only group to successfully drop floats from airplanes and was the group that first demonstrated innovative ways to deploy Argo floats from commercial vessels 鈥� container ships traversing the world’s oceans at full speed and not willing to stop and gently lower floats over the side.

The key is having just the right packaging, usually made of cardboard, that can protect a float’s antenna on impact but that can be easily shed once the float is submerged. At one point early on, the 91探花team was wrapping floats in cardboard held in place with string and candy Lifesavers 鈥� yes, Lifesavers 鈥� that would dissolve once in the salt water, freeing the float.

UW’s major contribution apart from the deployment efforts, Riser says, has been improving commercially available parts and floats to increase their capabilities.

“Early on, neither the batteries nor the internal mechanical parts were good enough,” Riser says. “Because we were buying the parts and building our own floats we learned a lot and helped on the ground floor to get the float technology so it was working and reliable.”

It’s something both commercial manufacturers and other Argo partners have readily taken advantage of, which is just fine with the 91探花team.

Riser says research scientist and engineer Dana Swift is the brains behind the UW’s Argo float production efforts, most recently leading efforts to re-engineer the floats for the waters around Antarctica. Those floats shouldn’t try to surface during the six months each year that part of the ocean is under ice.

As part of the International Polar Year now being celebrated, 100 floats specially built by the 91探花were deployed in Antarctic waters in September.

Most of the Argo floats around the world don’t take a six-month hiatus from transmitting data. Instead, they hang out about 1.25 miles beneath the ocean surface and begin to surface once every 10 days while measuring temperature and salinity. At the surface the floats start trying to transmit that data. If there is a satellite overhead, the data can be available on the Web within 24 hours for all to use.

Attaining the goal of 3,000 Argo floats means there’s a float covering roughly every 200 square miles of the Earth’s deep oceans. Consider the Pacific Ocean between Seattle and Japan, Riser says. Before Argo there would be maybe one or two points of data gathered each year across that 4,900-mile expanse of ocean. Now there are as many as 900 points every 10 days.

Argo floats worldwide are making 100,000 profiles a year, 20 times more than possible using ships. A profile is the data collected concerning water properties each time the float surfaces.

To ensure the floats are working correctly, UW’s Annie Wong, a research scientist and engineer in oceanography, developed a set of tools to assess what is being transmitted. All 22 countries involved in the Argo program have adopted Wong’s methodology and programs.

The challenge now that 3,000 floats are in the water is to continue replacing the ones that have reached the end of their useful lives, something that happens after about 4 陆 years, Riser says.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is very supportive of the replacement effort, Riser says. The $24 million the 91探花has received for Argo includes $16.5 million awarded by NOAA just last summer to schedule expeditions and replace floats through 2011. In the meantime officials are considering whether the Argo program should one day be run like the National Weather Service.

Satellites and instruments that monitor conditions at the sea surface — such as the moored buoys across the tropical Pacific used to detect changes preceding 1998’s devastating El Ni帽o — have greatly improved climate forecasts in recent years.

A 91探花 oceanographer is in Washington, D.C., today for a press conference announcing the first phase of a program that could take climate forecasting to the next level of accuracy by routinely making measurements up to a mile beneath the sea surface at points across all the world’s oceans.

91探花oceanographers and engineers are adapting and deploying more than half of the approximately 45 subsurface drifters expected to be in the water by the end of the year under the Argo program, named after the ship used by the mythological Greek hero Jason. Spearheaded with $4 million in initial support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Office of Naval Research, Argo is an ambitious program to deploy 3,000 specialized floats around the world. The United States has committed to provide at least a third of the floats during the next three years. Other countries, including Japan, Canada and Australia, also will launch floats.

“A global network of these floats would make it possible to understand the ocean’s impact on climate cycles and to improve forecasts of climate conditions,” says Stephen Riser, 91探花professor of oceanography.

NOAA has selected the UW, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to build the first floats and arrange for their deployment. All three institutions have successfully used similar floats in recent years for individual research projects and as a pilot for Argo. For example, Riser has used the floats in the Western Atlantic to measure the water temperature and velocity of currents in the ocean under hurricanes in an effort to determine how the ocean fuels or defuses a storm’s punch.

The floats are mechanical devices with electronic sensors and satellite antennas that drift about a mile below the sea surface and, every 10 days, ascend through the water collecting temperature and salinity data that they transmit via satellites to land-based laboratories. The floats can operate independently through their life of four to five years.

The 91探花launched its first five floats under the Argo program in June. The floats can be deployed from research vessels, container ships or even aircraft. Riser has arranged for four or five more to be set adrift in the South Pacific this month and next, and another eight to 16 in the Atlantic in November and December.

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For more information:
Stephen Riser, leave messages today and before 10 a.m. EDT on Wednesday at the Washington Plaza Hotel, (202) 842-1300; Riser returns to Seattle Wednesday afternoon, (206) 543-1187, riser@compass.ocean.washington.edu

Argo Web site: