NASA, NOAA, NSF to study gases important to climate change

William Atkins
Friday, 22 February 2008 06:39

Science - Climate

It was announced on Thursday, February 21, 2008 that a team of U.S. scientists will study the Southern Ocean as part of a six-week research expedition called the Southern Ocean Gas Exchange Experiment (SOGEE), also called GasEx III.             

Co-sponsors of the U.S. expedition are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration (NOAA), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The three organizations will send a total of thirty scientists to study the effect gases have on climate change, specifically how gases move on winds and sea waters between the atmosphere and the oceans. They will be specifically studying the Southern Ocean.

According to Christopher Sabine, a NOAA oceanographer at its Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, the reason why the team is going to the Southern Ocean is because “It is the largest ocean region where the surface waters directly connect to the ocean interior, providing a pathway into the deep sea for carbon dioxide released from human activities. Understanding how atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed into these cold surface waters under high winds speeds is important for determining how the ocean uptake of carbon dioxide will respond to future climate change." [NASA news release]

The scientists will come from a wide range of universities and research institutions

On February 28, 2008, the research team will board the NOAA ship Ronald H. Brown at Punta Arenas, Chile.

The ship was named in honor of former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown (August 1, 1941-April 3, 1996), who was killed in an airplane accident while performing his official duties.

The Ronald H. Brown, which was completed on May 30, 1996, is a sophisticated research vessel that will allow the scientists to study gases as they move between the atmosphere and the ocean—what is called air-sea exchange.

These gases, such as carbon dioxide and other important climate change gases, will be studied to how they relate to such ocean characteristics as bubbles, waves and the breaking of waves over the waters, turbulence, temperature, and, water color, and atmosphere characteristics such as wind speed and direction, temperature, and composition.

For instance, carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed into the world’s oceans in large quantities. In fact, it is estimated by scientists that about two billion metric tons of carbon is absorbed each year.

This amount relates to about 30 percent of the total annual global emission of carbon dioxide. However, wind speed can affect the rate at which carbon is absorbed: higher winds promote faster exchanges while lower winds slow down the process.

Scientists have not studied in detail how winds affect gas exchanges, so they hope to add to their knowledge in this expedition. This is just one of many experiments that will be conducted on the Southern Oceans expedition.

In the end, the SOGEE program hopes to improve the accuracy of climate models and their predictions.

According to Paula Bontempi, manager of NASA’s ocean biology and biogeochemistry research program, "NASA's ongoing effort to understand the global carbon cycle will benefit from the data this cruise will produce about the mechanisms that govern gas transfer in this remote part of the world's ocean. NASA's global satellite observations of ocean color that reveal so much about the health of our oceans also will be improved in this region as we validate what our space-based sensors see with direct measurements taken at sea." [NASA news release]

The expedition will be helped with a variety of existing technologies. One of them is the Aqua satellite. Please read on.