EXPERTS TO PEPPER SEAS FOR CLUES TO CLIMATE AND WEATHER
New York Times
19 September
Internet: http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/19/science/19OCEA.html
Next month, a research ship will drop six instrument-laden
yellow cylinders into the Pacific Ocean west of Peru, opening the
initial phase of Argo, an international project aimed at
illuminating one of the sea's best- kept secrets - how the deep
circulation of cold and warm water influences long-term climate
and short- term weather. Over the next several years, the
project, supported by the United States and more than a dozen
other countries, is scheduled to pepper the world's oceans with
3,000 of the cylinders, each of which will repeatedly sink nearly
a mile deep, drift in whatever current it finds, then ascend,
recording salinity and temperature changes along the way.=20
Each time a probe surfaces, the freshly collected data, along
with its location, will bounce via satellite to scientists who
can then incorporate the information into weather-forecasting
models, models of global warming or other research. Many
scientists, both inside and outside the project, say it stands to
improve understanding of the forces shaping weather and climate
at almost every scale: from the link between ocean temperatures
and the power of hurricanes to the way the oceans might sop up
some of the energy accumulating in the air as levels of
heat-trapping greenhouse gases rise.
Until now, scientists have only nibbled at such problems,
using temperature and salinity records and other data gleaned
over the decades by instruments mainly dropped along shipping
routes. "There are huge areas of open space with no information,"
said Dr. Thomas J. Crowley, an oceanographer and climate expert
at Texas A&M University who is not directly involved with Argo.
"This could fill in those holes," he said, "and give us a much
better estimate of changes in the deep structure of the ocean."
The American component of the project is being managed by the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, within the
Department of Commerce. In a telephone interview yesterday,
Commerce Secretary Norman Y. Mineta said Argo stood to provide
the first continuing globalmonitoring of the flow of energy
around the oceans. "What we've done in the past is piecemeal," he
said, adding that Argo was particularly important for improving
computer models used to estimate the extent of global warming. By
tracking the flow of warmth from air to oceans, he said, the
project "will help figure out what it is we have to be doing in
terms of greenhouse gas control."Argo is big science, probing all
the world's oceans a mile deep, but done with simple, low-budget
equipment: thousands of four-foot-tall torpedo- shaped devices,
each of which costs about $12,000 to build and $9,000 more to
monitor through 100 or so ups and downs before batteries die
after four years or so. The data on temperature should help
scientists understand how energy is exchanged between the air,
shallow ocean layers - which warm quickly - and deeper layers of
the ocean, which warm much more slowly, oceanographers said. The
hand-off of energy from shallow water to the depths is poorly
understood and extremely important for understanding how the
oceans influence climate, said Dr. W. Stanley Wilson, the deputy
chief scientist of NOAA.
So far, the agency has received financing to pay for deploying
and operating 187 probes, with a goal of getting enough support
from Congress to activate another 1,125 devices. About 230 other
probes have been financed by other countries, including Canada,
France, England, Japan and Australia, with plans for 1,100 more.
The probes are being dropped with the eventual goal of being a
uniformly distributed monitoring network.
See also--
CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/09/19/ocean.sensors/index.html
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