ALBERT

Description: This report summarizes the work, under the auspices of the WOCE Hydrographic Programme (WHP), which took place on the R/V Akademik Vernadsky in June-July 1991. The goal of the exercise was an international comparison/training cruise to obtain comparisons of water sampling methods and analytical techniques employed by several groups for the oceanographic measurement of salinity and oxygen in seawater. The training aspect was formalized in a pre-cruise practicum held on board the vessel by Dr. Fred Culkin and Mr. Paul Ridout of Ocean Scientific International, the manufacturer of IAPSO Standard Seawater, At-sea comparisons of Russian Reference Water, manufactured in Moscow, were made with IAPSO water. Further work involved comparisons of a Guildline and a pair of SOKOL salinometers using reference water and natural seawater collected on the cruise. While the agreement among the salnometers was quite good and at the level of acceptability for the WHP, it was discovered that lack of thermal equilbration of the salinity samples run on the SOKOLs led to substantial "errors" at large depths (or for cold water samples). This could not have been anticipated before the cruise and would have been missed in a shore-based or laboratory exercise. All five groups making oxygen comparisons benefitted from the technical exchange afforded by the cruise and, as a result of reconciling inter-group differences, have identified procedural changes they wil make in the future in order to achieve the high standards required by the WHP, The technical interaction, which amounted to "training" for all groups, was greatly facilitated by the cooperation of Captain Malnovsky, Chief Scientist Panteleyev, the scientists from MHI, Sevastopol, and the crew of the Vernadsky. On the Vernadsky comparison cruise, a shore-based practicum was held prior to sailing in order to review the theory and measurement of salinity. The cruise itself, which took place between 27 June and 8 July 1991, was in the NE Atlantic to the west of Madeira. An international group of experts in salnity and oxygen measurements was drawn from the United Kingdom (UK), Spain, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States (US). Except for one of the five groups, measured oxygen values in the range of 3-5 mIll (concentration units are used throughout) agreed with one another within :11%, which exceeds the WOCE requirements by a factor of 2. Subsequent analyses of the differences by all five groups could account for much of the observed inter-group variations, Intra-group precision was generally in the range of 0,1-0.4%, As a result, of a low oxygen sparging experiment in which sample oxygens 0: 1.2 mIll were generated, substantial inter-group differences of :1.08 mIll were found indicating that oxygen specifications for WOCE need to be expressed as both a percent "error" and a low oxygen bias. The salinity comparison component of the cruise enabled comparison of various batches of Russian Reference Water (RRW) of various salnities (10, 20, 30, 35 and 40) against IAPSO Standard Seawater (SSW) of various salinities (10, 30, 35 and 38); inferences could then also be drawn on the relative performance of the two types of salinometer (Guildline Autosal 8400 and SOKOL 4602) used during the experiment. Under quasilaboratory conditions, the machines produced mean results different by no more than 0.001 in salinity for salinity 35 RRW, standardizing against salinity 35 SSW. The other salnities produced less conclusive results, but the three salinometers deviated by no more than 0.003 from the expected value over a wide range of salinities. Under operational conditions (analysis of duplicate samples collected from CTD casts) a mean bias emerged between machines of approximately 0.005 in salinity (SOKOL fresher than Guildline), Subsequent investigations tentatively ascribed this bias to non-equilbration of deep (cold) samples in the Russian system.

Description: Prepared for the National Science Foundation under Grants OCE89-07815, and OCE92-06184, T. Joyce, Principal Investigator; Vetlesen Funds, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and with support from the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.

Description: © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Capotondi, A., Jacox, M., Bowler, C., Kavanaugh, M., Lehodey, P., Barrie, D., Brodie, S., Chaffron, S., Cheng, W., Dias, D. F., Eveillard, D., Guidi, L., Iudicone, D., Lovenduski, N. S., Nye, J. A., Ortiz, I., Pirhalla, D., Buil, M. P., Saba, V., Sheridan, S., Siedlecki, S., Subramanian, A., de Vargas, C., Di Lorenzo, E., Doney, S. C., Hermann, A. J., Joyce, T., Merrifield, M., Miller, A. J., Not, F., & Pesant, S. Observational needs supporting marine ecosystems modeling and forecasting: from the global ocean to regional and coastal systems. Frontiers in Marine Science, 6, (2019): 623, doi:10.3389/fmars.2019.00623.

Description: Many coastal areas host rich marine ecosystems and are also centers of economic activities, including fishing, shipping and recreation. Due to the socioeconomic and ecological importance of these areas, predicting relevant indicators of the ecosystem state on sub-seasonal to interannual timescales is gaining increasing attention. Depending on the application, forecasts may be sought for variables and indicators spanning physics (e.g., sea level, temperature, currents), chemistry (e.g., nutrients, oxygen, pH), and biology (from viruses to top predators). Many components of the marine ecosystem are known to be influenced by leading modes of climate variability, which provide a physical basis for predictability. However, prediction capabilities remain limited by the lack of a clear understanding of the physical and biological processes involved, as well as by insufficient observations for forecast initialization and verification. The situation is further complicated by the influence of climate change on ocean conditions along coastal areas, including sea level rise, increased stratification, and shoaling of oxygen minimum zones. Observations are thus vital to all aspects of marine forecasting: statistical and/or dynamical model development, forecast initialization, and forecast validation, each of which has different observational requirements, which may be also specific to the study region. Here, we use examples from United States (U.S.) coastal applications to identify and describe the key requirements for an observational network that is needed to facilitate improved process understanding, as well as for sustaining operational ecosystem forecasting. We also describe new holistic observational approaches, e.g., approaches based on acoustics, inspired by Tara Oceans or by landscape ecology, which have the potential to support and expand ecosystem modeling and forecasting activities by bridging global and local observations.

Description: This study was supported by the NOAA’s Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions, and Projections (MAPP) Program through grants NA17OAR4310106, NA17OAR4310104, NA17OAR4310108, NA17OAR4310109, NA17OAR4310110, NA17OAR4310111, NA17OAR4310112, and NA17OAR4310113. This manuscript is a product of the NOAA/MAPP Marine Prediction Task Force. The Tara Oceans consortium acknowledges support from the CNRS Research Federation FR2022 Global Ocean Systems Ecology and Evolution, and OCEANOMICS (grant agreement ‘Investissement d’Avenir’ ANR-11-BTBR-0008). This is article number 95 of the Tara Oceans consortium. MK and SD acknowledge support from NASA grant NNX14AP62A “National Marine Sanctuaries as Sentinel Sites for a Demonstration Marine Biodiversity Observation Network (MBON)” funded under the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP RFP NOAA-NOS-IOOS-2014-2003803 in partnership between NOAA, BOEM, and NASA), and the NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Program Office. WC, IO, and AH acknowledge partial support from the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean (JISAO) under NOAA Cooperative Agreement NA15OAR4320063, Contribution No. 2019-1029. This study received support from the European H2020 International Cooperation project MESOPP (Mesopelagic Southern Ocean Prey and Predators), grant agreement no. 692173.