Ships of Opportunity for Atmospheric Research: Pilot Efforts

Processes occurring over the oceans, including greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes and cloud-aerosol interactions, are a major source of uncertainty in the present climate state and hence in estimating near-term warming. To reduce this uncertainty, more comprehensive and specific observations over the oceans are needed. Due to the limited supply of dedicated research vessels, platforms of opportunity are essential to fill these observational gaps. We discuss here the Ships of Opportunity for Atmospheric Research (SOAR) program, a science infrastructure program built in collaboration with OceansX. SOAR’s purpose is to expand atmospheric observations in under-observed oceanic regions, providing new measurements to existing climate observation programs that provide open data to the global community.

 

We present current pilot projects under SOAR. A GHG flask sampler from NOAA Global Monitoring Lab is deployed on the Maersk Kentucky, which is taking samples as the ship transits the tropical Pacific. Sensors from NASA’s Maritime Aerosol Network (AERONET MAN), are also deployed on two other Maersk vessels and a Smyril Line vessel, where volunteer sailors are collecting aerosol optical depth measurements that are now accessible on the AERONET/MAN webpage. Finally, in collaboration with NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory, SilverLining is developing a version of the NOAA Federated Aerosol Network (NFAN) package for deployment on ships of opportunity. This effort includes integrating instruments into a system adapted to marine environments and validating it against the NFAN technical standards. This project serves as a proof of concept for including additional higher-complexity atmospheric instrumentation packages in ships of opportunity programs