U. Arizona: Global Ocean Data Illuminate Earth’s Future Climate

June 10, 2016

As global climate change accelerates with increasingly substantial impacts on communities worldwide, the need to understand and make reliable projections of future climate becomes ever more imperative.

The National Science Foundation(Link is external) (Link opens in new window)-funded Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling, or SOCCOM(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), project is meeting this need by deploying 200 robotic floats in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica to capture real-time biological, geological and chemical (often called “biogeochemical”) data.

With the help of CyVerse, the NSF-funded and University of Arizona(Link is external) (Link opens in new window)-led national data management project, SOCCOM hopes soon to expand the network of floats to monitor carbon cycling throughout the world’s swiftly changing oceans.

“We have an international agreement to reduce carbon and other greenhouse gases. Now is the time to act,” says Joellen Russell(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), an oceanographer and climate modeler in the UA’s Department of Geosciences, who heads up SOCCOM’s modeling efforts. “But we need to count the carbon in order to manage the carbon.”

SOCCOM is a coalition led by Princeton University(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) and includes the UA,Scripps Institute of Oceanography(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), University of Washington(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) (MBARI), Climate Central(Link is external) (Link opens in new window), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration(Link is external) (Link opens in new window) (NOAA), NSF and NASA(Link is external) (Link opens in new window).

Source: https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/global-ocean-data-illuminate-earths-future-cli…