The 天美影视传媒 is among leading U.S. oceanographic institutions that have received National Science Foundation funding to build and deploy 500 robotic ocean-monitoring floats to monitor the chemistry and biology of the world鈥檚 oceans.

The National Science Foundation on October 29 approved a $53 million, five-year grant to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI); the UW; Scripps Institution of Oceanography; the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and Princeton University. The consortium will build robotic ocean-monitoring floats to be distributed in oceans around the globe.

鈥淭his will be one of the largest awards that NSF has ever given in ocean sciences,鈥� said , a UW professor of oceanography. 鈥淚t will allow us to create and deploy an ocean observing system that will operate for decades and will influence our ideas about the carbon cycle, in the same way that the basic Argo program has helped our understanding of the physics of ocean circulation.鈥�

About $20.5 million of the award will go to the UW to build and deploy about 300 of the 500 floats, with another $3 million for maintenance. The UW team plans to begin construction in 2021 and hopes to put the first instruments in the water later that year. The new instruments are similar to roughly 200 the UW team previously built to survey the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, though these won鈥檛 have under-ice capabilities.

This new network of floats, called the , or GO-BGC Array, will collect observations of ocean chemistry and biology from the surface to a depth of 2 kilometers, or 1.24 miles. When the floats rise every nine days to the surface they will transmit data that will be made freely available to the public within a day of being collected for use by researchers, educators and policymakers around the world.

鈥淭hese observations will provide an unprecedented global view of ocean processes that determine carbon cycling, ocean acidification, deoxygenation and biological productivity 鈥� all of which have a critical impact on marine ecosystems and the climate of our planet,鈥� said , a UW assistant professor of oceanography.

These data will allow scientists to pursue fundamental questions about ocean ecosystems, observe ecosystem health and productivity, and monitor the elemental cycles of carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in the ocean through all seasons of the year. Such essential data are needed to improve computer models of ocean fisheries and climate, and to monitor and forecast the effects of ocean warming and ocean acidification on sea life.

Although scientists can use Earth-orbiting platforms and research vessels to monitor the ocean, satellites can only monitor near-surface waters, and the small global fleet of open-ocean research ships can only remain at sea for so long. As a result, ocean-health observations only cover a tiny fraction of the ocean at any given time, leaving huge ocean regions unvisited for decades, or longer.

A single robotic float costs the same as two days at sea on a research ship. But floats can collect data autonomously for over five years, in all seasons 鈥� including during winter storms, when shipboard work is limited.

Since 2014 the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling () program has deployed an array of robotic 鈥渂iogeochemical鈥� floats, based on the design, but carrying sensors to monitor the chemical and biological properties of the ocean. SOCCOM floats have operated for nearly six years in the remote, stormy, and often ice-covered Southern Ocean鈥攁rguably one of the harshest marine environments on Earth. These floats have already provided critical new information about how the Southern Ocean interacts with the Earth鈥檚 atmosphere and winter sea ice.

Similar to the SOCCOM floats, the new GO-BGC floats will carry several sensors in addition to the core Argo sensors for temperature, depth and salinity. These include instruments to measure oxygen concentration, pH (ocean acidity), nitrate (an essential nutrient for microscopic algae), sunlight (required for algal growth), chlorophyll (an indicator of algal populations) and particles in the water (including microscopic algae). Over the last few years, researchers have been testing, refining and calibrating these sensitive instruments as part of the SOCCOM program and other international efforts.

MBARI will coordinate the project, refine the sensors, take the lead in processing data from the floats, and do outreach for the program. Oceanographers at the UW, Scripps and the Woods Hole will build and deploy floats in collaboration with commercial partners. Researchers at Princeton University will contribute to the array design and project management, and ensure that the data are linked to global computer models of the Earth鈥檚 ocean and climate.

A broad public outreach program, including workshops, web-based curricula and hands-on activities will help scientists, teachers, students and others use the data. In an expansion of the existing SOCCOM program, the floats will be adopted by elementary- to college-level classes. Student activities will be developed through a partnership with the national program. Courses based on GO-BGC technology will also be offered through the , a makerspace at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The researchers hope that GO-BGC will inspire other countries to contribute similarly instrumented floats, as part of the new global biogeochemical Argo effort. Ideally, this expanded network will grow to a sustained array of 1,000 biogeochemical floats uniformly distributed around the world鈥檚 oceans, and spaced about 620 miles, or 1,000 kilometers, apart from each other.

鈥淯ntil now, biogeochemical data has not been collected for the vast majority of the world鈥檚 ocean. GO-BGC will transform our ability to observe and understand the chemical and biological cycles that are the foundation of marine food webs,鈥� said principal investigator Ken Johnson, a marine chemist at MBARI.

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For more information, contact Riser at riser@uw.edu or Gray at argray@uw.edu.

Adapted from an MBARI .

Kate Simonen, Vikram Prakash honored by Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture

and , faculty members in the Department of Architecture, have both received 2020 Architectural Education Awards from the .

The honor architectural educators across a dozen categories for “exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship and service.”

Prakash, professor of architecture, received a Distinguished Professor Award, recognizing “a positive, stimulating and nurturing” influence on students, inspiring them to contribute to the advancement of architecture.

Simonen, associate professor of architecture, received the TAD Research Contribution Award, for the best article 鈥� “Benchmarking the Embodied Carbon of Buildings” 鈥� from the association’s Simonen’s co-authors are graduate research assistant and Swiss researcher . Simonen is founding director of the UW-based . Learn more on the College of Built Environments .

Top newsmaker: Simonen also was named one of the by Engineering News Record. “It has been a banner year for Kate Simonen and her burgeoning band of embodied carbon busters bent on reducing the negative environmental impacts of building production,” the editors write. The top newsmakers will be celebrated April 2 at an event in New York.

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Seattle Times names Valerie Curtis-Newton among most influential people of the decade

The Seattle Times has named , UW professor of drama, as one of “.”

A professor of directing and acting, Curtis-Newton is head of directing for the School of Drama, and also heads the , dedicated to exploring African American life, history and culture.

Calling Curtis-Newton “a titan in the Seattle cultural scene,” the Times writes: “She got there not by being flashy (though she’s certainly capable of inspiring a crowd) but by doing the hard work in the trenches, with the community and inside arts organizations large and small, doggedly insisting on two things: artistic excellence and increasingly incorporating a Black lens into the collective view of what theater is and can be.”

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Alison Gray, professor of oceanography, receives first Microsoft Investigator Fellowship

, UW assistant professor of oceanography, has been named recipient of an inaugural . The awards are given to empower researchers of all disciplines who plan to make an impact with research and teaching using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Each fellowship provides $100,000 a year for two years and various training and community events.

Gray studies the circulation of the ocean and its impact on the physics and chemistry of the climate system. Her research seeks to improve understanding of the interactions between ocean circulation and global biogeochemical cycles.

Microsoft chose 15 fellowships among over 290 proposals received. Learn more on the College of the Environment or the original Microsoft .

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Donna Berry, Jennifer Sonney chosen for School of Nursing faculty endowed fellowships

School of Nursing faculty members and have been chosen the inaugural recipients of two endowed faculty fellowship awards.

Berry will receive the Health Informatics Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Nursing, established by Marjorie V. Batey. Berry will work to implement evidence-based practices in acute care and ambulatory settings by integrating health informatics technologies into clinical processes.

Sonney, an assistant professor of nursing, will receive the Endowed Faculty Fellowship in Symptom Science, which is supported by two endowments; one was established by Batey in the name of Elizabeth C. Giblin; the other is in the names of Lucia S. and Herbert L. Pruzan. Sonney will work to improve the health of children with asthma by reducing symptoms and establishing lifelong self-management skills.

Learn more from an .

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Four UW bioengineers receive Society for Biomaterials 2020 awards

, and will receive the 2020 Technology Innovation and Development Award from the which promotes advances in biomaterials sciences research and development. will receive the society’s 2020 Young Investigators Award. The were announced Jan. 6.

The Technology Innovation and Development Award recognizes an individual or team’s successful application of basic and applied biomaterials research in development of a new medical product or technology that significantly benefits medical or surgical patients.

The three faculty members were honored for leadership of the UW-based , which was started by Ratner and is co-directed by Castner and Gamble.

Gamble is a research associate professor of bioengineering, Castner a professor emeritus of chemical engineering and of bioengineering, and Ratner a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering.

The Young Investigators Award recognizes an individual demonstrating outstanding achievements in biomaterials research. DeForest is assistant professor of chemical engineering and of bioengineering.

All four are of the .

Around the planet’s oceans, nearly 4,000 floats 鈥� many of them built at the 天美影视传媒 鈥� are plunging up and down, collecting and transmitting observations of the world’s oceans.

This fall, one of these diving robots made the program’s , reporting temperature and salinity recorded to a depth of about a mile.

The is a 20-year-old project to gather 3D data on the oceans. The U.S. program is part of an with 26 countries that operate floats throughout the planet’s waters.

“When we started in 1999, no one would have even considered the 2 million profile milestone,” said , a UW professor of oceanography. “In the beginning there was some question about whether the instruments would even work well enough to do this. We were just hoping it would work for the first few years.”

The UW has manufactured between one third and one half of the U.S. floats now in use, Riser said, which account for about half the international total. So the UW has manufactured about a fifth or a sixth of the world’s supply.

The UW manufactures roughly 110 floats per year that get deployed around the planet. Two undergraduates work in the lab and three graduate students are working with the data. Of this year’s UW floats, two-thirds were destined for the South Pacific and the other third are going to Antarctica.

Scientists say the nearly 20-year-old robotic fleet has transformed oceanography: Satellites track information only from the ocean’s surface, while ship-based observations are expensive and see only a small snapshot.

“Not to be too hyperbolic, but Argo has really revolutionized physical oceanography,” said , an assistant professor of oceanography. “I think it’s been one of the largest successes of any observational program of its kind.”

The cylindrical robots, about the size of a large rolled-up poster, dive down to a depth of 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) to drift with currents, then later sink down to 2 kilometers. After 10 days below the surface they adjust their buoyancy and gather data on the upward trip. Once at the surface, an antenna beams data back to computers onshore. A single battery lets the robot explore unaided for four to five years.

“One of the most important practical uses for the data is in weather forecasting, in that the data that we get from Argo have significantly improved weather forecasts and marine forecasting around the world,” Gray said. “But scientists are interested in the data to understand the processes that are controlling the ocean, and how the ocean impacts the climate system.”

More than 4,000 scientific papers and 275 doctoral theses have been written using Argo data. Observations are uploaded to the internet every three hours and are then available for free for anyone to use.

“That’s become the norm, the real-time availability of data,” Riser said. “But that was not the norm when we started in 2000.”

In the future, and floats will travel deeper and measure more things than the original devices. Both are in small-scale prototype mode now, Riser said, and researchers hope to secure funding for a larger-scale deployment. In addition to temperature and salinity these can measure ocean pH, oxygen, nitrate, chlorophyll found in microscopic algae, and light penetration.

While the existing Argo array helps to understand the movement of heat in the oceans, the newer technology will explore the deep ocean and help track the movement of carbon, which is the other half of the climate puzzle, Riser said.

“In coming years, it will be really important to maintain the core array, the high-quality data that’s coming in, but also to expand into these new areas: sensors that can measure new variables, and technology that lets us go into deeper water or even into coastal regions,” Gray said.

The UW has already been as part of a dedicated project to study the ocean around Antarctica. A global Argo version would be similar, Riser said, but without the ice-avoidance capabilities.

“The biogeochemical floats will be a whole different set of results that we can’t even imagine right now,” Riser said. “It won’t just be the heat part of the ocean cycle, it will be the carbon cycle. There’s a tremendous amount to learn.”

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For more information, contact Gray at argray@uw.edu or 206-543-0593 or Riser at riser@uw.edu or 206-543-1187.

More than 100 oceanic floats are now diving and drifting in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica during the peak of winter. These instruments are gathering data from a place and season that remains very poorly studied, despite its important role in regulating the global climate.

A new from the 天美影视传媒, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Princeton University and several other oceanographic institutions uses data gathered by the floating drones over past winters to learn how much carbon dioxide is transferred by the surrounding seas. Results show that in winter the open water nearest the sea ice surrounding Antarctica releases significantly more carbon dioxide than previously believed.

“These results came as a really big surprise, because previous studies found that the Southern Ocean was absorbing a lot of carbon dioxide,” said lead author , a UW assistant professor of oceanography. “If that’s not true, as these data suggest, then it means we need to rethink the Southern Ocean’s role in the carbon cycle and in the climate.”

The paper is published Aug. 14 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The data was gathered through the (SOCCOM) project based at Princeton University. The National Science Foundation, through its Office of Polar Programs, funded the $21 million effort to place dozens of floating robots to monitor the water around Antarctica and learn how it functions in the global climate system.

“This is science at its most exciting 鈥� a major challenge to our current understanding made possible by extraordinary observations from the application of new technologies to study previously unexplored regions of the ocean,” said co-author and SOCCOM director at Princeton University. Gray conducted the research as a postdoctoral researcher in Sarmiento’s research group.

“Our observations have important implications for our understanding of the global carbon cycle,” Sarmiento said. “We find that the Southern Ocean is currently near neutral with respect to removal of carbon from the atmosphere, contrary to previous studies which suggest there is a large uptake of carbon by the Southern Ocean. These results can be reconciled if there is a corresponding unobserved carbon uptake waiting to be discovered somewhere else in the ocean.”

Previous winter measurements in the region had come mainly from ships traveling across Drake Passage to supply Antarctic research stations. Those data were few and far between.

“After four years of SOCCOM, the vast majority of information about the chemistry of the Southern Ocean is coming from these floats,” Gray said. “We have more measurements from the past few years than all the decades that came before.”

There are reasons so few previous winter measurements exist. Storms in Antarctica are some of the fiercest on the planet. In winter, the circumpolar current and winds have no barrier to ripping around the continent. The average storm lasts four days, Gray said. The average time between storms is seven days.

“In the winter it’s very stormy, and the winds are extremely strong, and it’s dark,” Gray said. “It would be a pretty unhappy place to be on a ship.”

The SOCCOM project was launched because this region also plays a unique role in the climate. It is one of the few places where water that has spent centuries in the deep ocean travels all the way up to the surface to rejoin the surface currents and connect with the atmosphere.

Carbon atoms move between rocks, rivers, plants, oceans and other sources in a planet-scale life cycle. Learning the rate of these various transfers helps to predict the long-term levels of carbon dioxide, a molecule released by burning fossil fuels that, when it accumulates in the atmosphere, traps heat.

The new observations were collected by floating instruments that drift with the currents and can control their buoyancy to collect observations at different depths. The instruments dive down to 1 kilometer and float with the currents for nine days. Next they drop even farther, to 2 kilometers, and then rise back to the surface while measuring water properties. After surfacing they beam their observations back to shore via satellite.

Unlike the more common Argo floats, which only measure ocean temperature and salinity, the SOCCOM floats also monitor dissolved oxygen, nitrogen and pH. The new paper uses the pH measurements to calculate the amount of dissolved carbon dioxide, and then uses that to figure out how strongly the water is absorbing or emitting carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Looking at circles of increasing distance from the South Pole, the authors find that in winter the open water next to the sea-ice covered waters around Antarctica is releasing significantly more carbon dioxide than expected to the atmosphere.

“It’s not surprising that the water in this region is outgassing, because the deep water is exceptionally rich in carbon,” Gray said. “But we underestimated the magnitude of the outgassing because we had so little data from the winter months. That means the Southern Ocean isn’t absorbing as much carbon as we thought.”

The published study analyzes data collected by 35 floats between 2014 and 2017. Gray is now analyzing newer data from more instruments to identify seasonal or multiyear trends, where the patterns might change from one year to the next.

“There is definitely strong variability on decadal scales in the Southern Ocean,” Gray said. “And the models are really all over the place in this region. The SOCCOM floats are now providing data at times and places where before we had virtually nothing, and that is invaluable for constraining the models and understanding these trends.”

Obtaining this kind of data is extremely difficult to do in the Southern Ocean, which is among the world鈥檚 most turbulent bodies of water, yet at the same time is vital to building a comprehensive global picture of how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with the polar oceans.

“Antarctic waters, until now, have been a data-poor region for these kinds of measurements,” said Peter Milne, program manager for ocean and atmospheric science at the NSF Office of Polar Programs. “SOCCOM, using technologies that previously were unavailable to researchers, already is proving its worth by gathering information that otherwise would remain largely unobtainable.”

NSF’s Office of Polar Programs manages the U.S. Antarctic Program, which coordinates all U.S. research on the southernmost continent.

The study was funded by the NSF, with additional support from NOAA and NASA. Other co-authors are Stephen Riser at the UW; Kenneth Johnson at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute; Seth Bushinsky at Princeton University; Joellen Russell at the University of Arizona; Lynne Talley at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Rik Wanninkhof at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; and Nancy Williams at Oregon State University.

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For more information, contact Alison Gray at argray@uw.edu or 206-543-0593 or Ken Johnson at johnson@mbari.org or 831-775-1985.

NSF grant: PLR-1425989; NASA grant: NNX-14AP49G