NSF Org: OCE
Division Of Ocean Sciences
Initial Amendment Date: September 5, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: September 5, 2018
Award Number: 1842412
Award Instrument: Continuing grant
Program Manager: Kandace S. Binkley
OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences
GEO Directorate For Geosciences
Start Date: November 1, 2018
End Date: October 31, 2021 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date: $450,002.00
Investigator(s): Melissa Omand momand@uri.edu (Principal Investigator)
Ken Buesseler (Co-Principal Investigator)
Zhaohui ‘Aleck’ Wang (Co-Principal Investigator)
Kakani Young (Co-Principal Investigator)
Allan Adams (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor: University of Rhode Island
RESEARCH OFFICE
KINGSTON, RI 02881-1967 (401)874-2635
NSF Program(s): OCEAN TECH & INTERDISC COORDIN
Program Reference Code(s): 9150
Program Element Code(s): 1680

ABSTRACT

This project will develop ocean observing floats using new technologies for tracking and imaging the transport of individual particles to the deep ocean and contribute to our understanding of the biological carbon pump (BCP). Tracking what happens to carbon in our oceans is critical for understanding the world’s climate. If successful, the floats will collect data that could provide new insights with respect to our understanding of the Biological Carbon Pump (BCP) and global carbon cycling. The project will also support graduate student participation.

The transport of organic carbon from the ocean’s surface to its abyssal depths plays a central role in regulating atmospheric carbon, and thus the climate. Understanding the “Biological Carbon Pump”, is thus crucial to predicting the evolution of the world’s climate. However, due to the complexity of this process and the limitations of available observations (largely from bulk geochemical analyses of the contents of particle-intercepting traps), predictions of oceanic carbon sequestration remain extremely uncertain. What we need now are autonomous tools which are both Lagrangian, essential for accurately quantifying respiration, sinking rates, and fluxes, and widely deployable (low cost), essential for reducing spatial and temporal aliasing, and for ensuring statistical significance. The proposed float technology will merge recent technological developments in environmental tag technology and low-cost imaging into a modular, low-cost platform that will result in the next generation of observing platforms and have a large impact on the state of our understanding of important carbon pathways. The goal is to make possible dense distributions of Lagrangian platforms that can directly observe the transport and transformation of individual particles that drive the BCP.

This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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