HR: 10:20h
AN: B32A-01 INVITED     [Abstracts]
TI: A SOLAS challenge: How can we test test feedback loops involving air-sea exchange?
AU: * Huebert, B J
EM: huebert@hawaii.edu
AF: University of Hawaii, Dept. of Oceanography, Honolulu, HI 96822 United States
AB: It is now well accepted that the Earth System links biological and physical processes in the water, on land, and in the air, creating countless feedback loops and dependencies that are at best difficult to quantify. One example of interest to SOLAS scientists is the suspension and long-range transport of dust from Asia, which may or may not interact with acidic air pollutants, that may increase the biological availability of iron, thereby increasing primary productivity in parts of the Pacific. This could increase DMS emissions and modify the radiative impact of Pacific clouds, affecting the climate and the hydrological system that limits the amount of dust lofted each year. Air-sea exchange is central to many such feedbacks: Variations in productivity in upwelling waters off Peru probably change DMS emissions and modify the stratocumulus clouds that blanket that region, thereby feeding back to productivity. The disparate time and space scales of the controlling processes make it difficult to observationally constrain such systems without the use of multi-year time-series and intensive multiplatform process studies. Unfortunately, much of the infrastructure for funding Earth science is poorly suited for supporting multidisciplinary research. For example, NSF's program managers are organized into disciplines and sub-disciplines, and rely on disciplinary reviewer communities that are protective of their slices of the funding pie. It is easy to find authors of strong, innovative, cross-disciplinary (yet unsuccessful) proposals who say they'll never try it again, because there is so little institutional support for interfacial research. Facility issues also complicate multidisciplinary projects, since there are usually several allocating groups that don't want to commit their ships, airplanes, or towers until the other groups have done so. The result is that there are very few examples of major interdisciplinary projects, even though IGBP core programs have articulated the need for them. Achieving IGBP's goals requires new observational and organizational strategies. Some relatively modest changes in the ways that facilities and grants are awarded could make it possible to do multidisciplinary experiments of the type described in the SOLAS Science Plan and Implementation Strategy.
DE: 1635 Oceans (4203)
DE: 0312 Air/sea constituent fluxes (3339, 4504)
DE: 0315 Biosphere/atmosphere interactions
DE: 0330 Geochemical cycles
DE: 0400 Biogeosciences
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting