SOTS: automated moorings for climate and carbon cycle studies in the Southern Ocean

Voyage summary

Research voyage to the Southern Ocean to maintain long-term deep-water automated moorings for monitoring of ocean and climate.

This voyage will contribute to global data sets and increase understanding of Southern Ocean characteristics, variability and processes. The Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) moorings provide year-long observations in a critical part of the Southern Ocean, where ocean interactions are most intense and least studied. This is information vital for informing ocean and climate modelling.

The primary voyage objective is to deploy a new set of SOTS moorings (SOFS-11 and SAZ-24) and then recover the existing SOTS moorings (SOFS-10 and SAZ-23) in approximately 4500-4700 metre ocean depths.

There are 4 other projects included on this voyage:

• Ecological and carbon sequestration role of mesopelagic organisms in the ocean (Dr Ben Scoulding, CSIRO): Survey of micronekton (small crustaceans, squids, fishes and gelatinous organisms).
• Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Radiation Interactions eXperiment – CAPRIX (Dr Jay Mace, University of Utah):  Ongoing program of atmospheric surveys via release of radiosondes (weather balloons).
• Dust to the ocean: does it really increase productivity? (Prof Zanna Chase, University of Tasmania): quantifying dust deposition to the ocean and its chemical and ecological impact using new geochemical techniques.
• o Argo float deployments (Mr Craig Hanstein, CSIRO): Deployment of one standard Argo float .

SOTS is part of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), a global monitoring program to collect long time-series ocean data to better understand ocean and climate change and variability.

The science team on this voyage will have 28 science participants (and 20 crew) representing 4 institutions.

Voyage outcomes

A summary of voyage outcomes will be published approximately 3-6 months after the completion of the voyage.