Siegel, David (Dave): UC Santa Barbara (Project Lead)
Project Funding:
2013 - 2015
NRA: 2012 NASA: Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry
Funded by NASA
Abstract:
The determination of rates of net community production (NCP) and export production (EP) is important for many global ocean problems including understanding the role of the biological pump on atmospheric CO2 levels and thereby climate as well as the predicting the impacts of fossil fuel CO2 emissions on ocean ecosystems and biogeochemical cycles. The determination of EP and NCP on regional to global space scales and seasonal to interannual time scales is central for the rationale for NASA s up-coming Pre-Aerosol-Cloud-Ecosystems (PACE) mission. However, our ability to assess these important carbon cycle parameters from satellite data remains quite limited and new approaches and data sets are desperately needed.
We propose the development of a major field campaign focused on a process level description of NCP and EP to provide progress toward the prediction of important carbon cycle parameters on local to global scales. This field campaign we have coined (for now) as: Controls on Open Ocean Productivity and EXport COOPEX. The overarching question for COOPEX is How do upper ocean processes control net community production and carbon export in the open ocean and the sequestration of exported carbon to depth? A major field campaign focused on controls of carbon cycling parameters is needed to elucidate the underlying mechanisms controlling NCP and EP in the open ocean and provide the necessary data and models to assess changes in these parameters that can be measured by satellite observations. There are many recent technical advances in remote sensing science, ocean biogeochemistry, bio-optics, autonomous sampling platforms and coupled physical-ecological-biogeochemical numerical modeling that make this vision a possibility and one that needs to be accomplished now.
Here, we request support from the NASA Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry program to develop an implementation plan for COOPEX. Funds are requested for a small scoping workshop of domain experts (~25) to be held at UC Santa Barbara to scope and formulate the COOPEX implementation plan. The scoping workshop and the implementation plan writing will be led by Dave Siegel (UCSB) and Ken Buesseler (WHOI). Assisting them is a team of domain experts that will help steer the project forward and will assist in the writing of the implementation plan.
Publications:
Siegel, D. A., Buesseler, K. O., Behrenfeld, M. J., Benitez-Nelson, C. R., Boss, E., Brzezinski, M. A., Burd, A., Carlson, C. A., D'Asaro, E. A., Doney, S. C., Perry, M. J., Stanley, R. H. R., Steinberg, D. K. 2016. Prediction of the Export and Fate of Global Ocean Net Primary Production: The EXPORTS Science Plan. Frontiers in Marine Science. 3. DOI: 10.3389/fmars.2016.00022
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
