HR: 1350h
AN: U23C-1458    [Abstracts]
TI: Towards an Autonomous Global Ocean Carbon Observatory
AU: * Bishop, J K
EM: jkbishop@berkeley.edu
AF: Dept. of Earth and Planetary Science, University of California, Berkeley, 307 McCone Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4767, United States
AU: * Bishop, J K
EM: jkbishop@berkeley.edu
AF: Earth Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA 94720, United States
AB: The ocean is by far the largest carbon reservoir in rapid communication with the atmosphere. Understanding both ocean carbon chemistry and ocean carbon biology are critical for carbon prediction. Marine carbon biomass accounts for roughly 50% of global carbon photosynthesis and a ~10 Pg C/year particulate carbon flux through 100 m into the deep sea. The latter export is commonly referred to as the biological carbon pump. The entire plant biomass of the ocean turns over on week time scales. We lack predictive skill for the biological pump mainly because observations of the biological pump have to be tied to ships which are unable to remain at sea at any location longer than several weeks. Since 2001, a dozen low cost, long lived, robotic Carbon Explorers have been deployed to operate in the ocean for year-long time scales and return real-time information on the daily variation of Particulate Organic Carbon (POC) concentration of the upper 1000 m of the ocean. On June 22 2007 the next generation of Explorer, the Carbon Flux Explorer (CFE) was recovered after a successful two day test and routine operation as deep as 800 m in waters of the San Clemente Basin off shore of San Diego. The CFE represents integration of the Optical Sedimentation Recorder (engineered at Berkeley Laboratory) and the Sounding Ocean Lagrangian Observer (SOLO) profiling float engineered at Scripps. Every eight hours, the CFE surfaced and transmitted in real time engineering and position information in minutes to shore and ship via Iridium satellite link. This fully autonomous and robotic free vehicle/instrument is designed to follow (at hourly resolution) variations of particulate organic and inorganic carbon sedimentation for seasons. Beyond enhanced predictability of the ocean biological carbon pump brought by such enhanced technology, it is fully feasible in the next decade to implement a low cost real-time ocean carbon observing system (a CARBON-ARGO), capable of real time assessment of ocean carbon flux which when coupled with atmospheric CO2 measurements will constrain the balance between carbon emissions and natural and human mediated carbon sinks on land.
UR: http://www-ocean.lbl.gov
DE: 4806 Carbon cycling (0428)
DE: 4863 Sedimentation (1861)
DE: 4894 Instruments, sensors, and techniques
SC: Union [U]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting