Siegel, David (Dave): UC Santa Barbara (Project Lead)
Project Funding:
2016 - 2020
NRA: 2015 NASA: Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry
Abstract:
The biological carbon pump is thought to export ~10 Pg C each year from the surface ocean to ocean’s interior largely in the form of settling organic particles. The monitoring and prediction of global carbon export and time scales for its sequestration remain important unknowns of the ocean’s carbon cycle. To attack this problem, NASA is implementing the EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing (EXPORTS) field campaign. The goal of EXPORTS is to gain a predictive understanding of the export and fates of global ocean net primary production (NPP).
The EXPORTS Science Plan focuses on quantifying the pathways in which NPP is exported from the upper ocean and is sequestered at depth. The EXPORTS field campaign as planned will likely observe maybe eight distinct ecosystem / carbon cycling states; yet its plan is to answer its science questions by performing longitudinal analyses of observations made across a range of states. Unfortunately the statistical confidence in these results may be quite poor as only a small number of realizations may be afforded from the field program alone. The good news is that there are many sites where high quality ecosystem / carbon cycling observations are available from online repositories and literature accounts from previous and on-going research programs.
Because of the available of these data, the data mining of available observations is an integral part of the EXPORTS Science Plan and likely critical to its success.
Here, we propose a pilot study to assess how to address the EXPORTS Science Questions by data mining previous observations. Specifically, our proposed objectives are to:
o Collect and collate available global ocean ecosystem and carbon cycling field
observations useful for addressing the EXPORTS Science Questions,
o Construct EXPORTS data products and wiring diagrams from available data and
distribute and publish them for their wide use, and
o Evaluate the use of the mined data products for assessing the EXPORTS Science Questions and developing advanced satellite algorithms and numerical models.
Although the geographic focus for the collection of useful data is global, an emphasis will be made for assembling data from the North Atlantic and Northeast Pacific sites that are the planned locations for the EXPORTS field campaign efforts. By completing the objectives of the proposed work, we will clearly contribute to the EXPORTS planning and risk reduction process conducted by the EXPORTS Science Definition Team. Our request responds to Sub-Element 2.2 (and to a lesser degree Sub-Element 2.3) in the 2015 ROSES Ocean Biology and Biogeoochemistry Program Element A3.
More details may be found in the following project profile(s):
