Research Institutions

Jorge Sarmiento was the Founding Director of the program and Curtis Deutsch is the current PI for Princeton.  Roberta Hotinski is the SOCCOM Project Manager.

Lynne Talley is the current Director of SOCCOM and heads Theme 1 – Observations, including float production, cruise planning for deployment of the SOCCOM floats and observational analysis, with colleagues Sarah Purkey, Sarah Gille and Todd Martz. Analysis and modeling include the biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate (B-SOSE), led by SIO’s Matt Mazloff, Ariane Verdy and Bruce Cornuelle; B-SOSE is a general circulation model of the ocean that incorporates all available observational data, including biogeochemical data from the profiling floats, to provide a physically and biogeochemically realistic representation of the Southern Ocean.

Ken Johnson is the Associate Director of SOCCOM and has led the development of the nitrate and high-pressure pH sensors that are used in the project and has been active in the development of biogeochemical floats. He and Yui Takeshita supply the University of Washington with sensors for the SOCCOM floats. George Matsumoto leads an outreach effort to share data, technology and lessons learned from our research with the scientific community, educators, policymakers, and the general public.

Steve Riser (co-lead of Theme 1) and Alison Gray lead the UW effort to build SOCCOM floats from commercial components, integrate the BGC sensors, and perform extensive testing and calibration before shipping them to the cruises that will deploy them. They also have an extensive role in interpreting the float data. 

​Joellen Russell leads the Theme 2 – Modeling effort to use the new biogeochemical data to analyze and improve a new generation of high resolution (1/10°) earth system models to both increase our understanding of the Southern Ocean’s current workings and make better projections of the future trajectory of the Earth’s climate and biogeochemistry.

Oscar Schofield of Rutgers University has led the effort to supply bio-optical sensors for SOCCOM floats.  He will analyze float data as part of the Observations team and will also lead outreach efforts in the area of undergraduate research.

The U.S. Argo program has partnered with SOCCOM by supplying one half of the basic profiling floats, allowing SOCCOM to substantially increase the number of floats with biogeochemical sensors that are deployed per year. NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory runs high-resolution earth-system modelling experiments in support of the project. Two other NOAA labs are also collaborating scientifically on the SOCCOM project:

Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (AOML)

Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)

NASA has funded a complementary project to supply SOCCOM floats with bio-optical sensors in the first 10 years of the project.