• Three-week cruise starts Feb. 25
• Follow along on the

With winter quarter in full swing and many students spending long hours in the library or the lab, a group of undergraduates will leave the coast of Japan for an unusually ambitious research and teaching expedition.

They leave Monday (Feb. 25) and will travel for about three weeks, flying back to Seattle in mid-March. It’s part of a senior-level course, , that will induct 11 seniors into the UW tradition of ship-based undergraduate research.

“The students are going to find out exactly what oceanographers do, and they’re either going to like it or not,” said instructor , a UW professor of oceanography. “For sure, it’s going to be something they’ll remember for the rest of their lives.”

Emerson and fellow instructor and oceanography professor are chief scientists on one of the UW’s most far-flung undergraduate cruises.

In previous years, students have gone on research cruises off the coast of Washington, Vancouver Island and between Seattle and Hawaii. Last year’s combined research and teaching cruise took place off the coast of Chile.

This year’s goal is to study the Pacific equivalent to the Gulf Stream, known as the Kuroshio Current, which flows northward along the coast of Japan. It’s known that the fast current absorbs unusually high quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, but the reason is a mystery.

UW faculty and graduate students hope to understand what role organisms play in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, so they can improve computer models that try to predict how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect the climate.

Four scientists and three graduate students will conduct their own research while assisting the undergraduates.

Students will carry out collecting data to study water movement, acidity, and the relationship between satellite imagery and abundance of marine plant and animal life. Their research will become senior-level theses, and in some cases could lead to scientific publications.

“It’s one thing to sit in class and learn the theory, or even help with someone else’s research,” said Mariela Tuquero, a UW oceanography senior from Tacoma. “It’s another thing to have your own project that you care about, to be getting data that’s personal to you and interpreting the results.”

She said she’s excited, but also a little nervous – she has packed a box of Dramamine to help with seasickness.

Students begin in fall quarter learning about field research and designing their projects. In winter quarter they collect data and in the spring they will interpret that data, write a paper and present their findings.

During this year’s cruise UW researchers will deploy 18 built in Riser’s lab, which will join more than 3,000 that already measure temperature and salinity in the top half mile of the world’s oceans. These new floats include sensors fine-tuned by UW faculty and graduate students to precisely measure the amount of dissolved oxygen, which helps to detect the rate of photosynthesis.

Within a few hours of deployment, the new floats will begin to dive down, gradually rise to the surface, and beam data back to the UW. By this time next year the team will have a full year’s cycle of vertical profiles collected every 10 days. The floats will continue to collect data for about five years, until their batteries die and they sink to the ocean floor.

“Studying oxygen gives us some information about biological productivity,” Emerson said. “By March 2014 these floats will generate 18 annual cycles in different areas of the Kuroshio Current off of Japan.”

The cruise will take place on a Scripps Institution of Oceanography research vessel because the UW’s Thomas G. Thompson research vessel has been undergoing repairs. The research portion of the cruise is supported by the National Science Foundation. The student ship time is supported by the State of Washington, through an agreement that brought the Thompson to the UW in 1991 in exchange for 40 days each summer of ship-based undergraduate research.

“I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities I’ve had at the university,” Tuquero said.

The only global-ocean climate-monitoring system — comprised of satellites and specialized floats — passed a milestone earlier this month when a UW and Scripps Institution of Oceanography expedition was in a position to deploy Argo float No. 3,000.

“Argo, in conjunction with satellites, is the best global-scale observation system we’ve ever had and probably will be for at least the next decade,” says Stephen Riser, UW professor of oceanography. He was among the earliest organizers of the program to deploy 3,000 floats in the deep waters of the world’s oceans.

Since the project’s launch in 2000, Riser’s UW team has received $24 million in funding and has been responsible for building and deploying nearly 20 percent of all the Argo floats. Only U.S. partner Scripps and the country of Japan have deployed as many.

Argo floats measure temperature and salinity — often called the vital signs of the ocean. Those measurements in recent years have been used around the world to improve seasonal climate forecasts and refine climate models. Some countries in the 22-nation Argo network — including Ecuador and Kenya, two of the newest members — want the ocean data for their fisheries management models, Riser says. The measurements also will help scientists and policy makers understand how the oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat from global warming during the past 50 years.

In seven years of launching Argo floats, the UW team is the only group to successfully drop floats from airplanes and was the group that first demonstrated innovative ways to deploy Argo floats from commercial vessels — container ships traversing the world’s oceans at full speed and not willing to stop and gently lower floats over the side.

The key is having just the right packaging, usually made of cardboard, that can protect a float’s antenna on impact but that can be easily shed once the float is submerged. At one point early on, the UW team was wrapping floats in cardboard held in place with string and candy Lifesavers — yes, Lifesavers — that would dissolve once in the salt water, freeing the float.

UW’s major contribution apart from the deployment efforts, Riser says, has been improving commercially available parts and floats to increase their capabilities.

“Early on, neither the batteries nor the internal mechanical parts were good enough,” Riser says. “Because we were buying the parts and building our own floats we learned a lot and helped on the ground floor to get the float technology so it was working and reliable.”

It’s something both commercial manufacturers and other Argo partners have readily taken advantage of, which is just fine with the UW team.

Riser says research scientist and engineer Dana Swift is the brains behind the UW’s Argo float production efforts, most recently leading efforts to re-engineer the floats for the waters around Antarctica. Those floats shouldn’t try to surface during the six months each year that part of the ocean is under ice.

As part of the International Polar Year now being celebrated, 100 floats specially built by the UW were deployed in Antarctic waters in September.

Most of the Argo floats around the world don’t take a six-month hiatus from transmitting data. Instead, they hang out about 1.25 miles beneath the ocean surface and begin to surface once every 10 days while measuring temperature and salinity. At the surface the floats start trying to transmit that data. If there is a satellite overhead, the data can be available on the Web within 24 hours for all to use.

Attaining the goal of 3,000 Argo floats means there’s a float covering roughly every 200 square miles of the Earth’s deep oceans. Consider the Pacific Ocean between Seattle and Japan, Riser says. Before Argo there would be maybe one or two points of data gathered each year across that 4,900-mile expanse of ocean. Now there are as many as 900 points every 10 days.

Argo floats worldwide are making 100,000 profiles a year, 20 times more than possible using ships. A profile is the data collected concerning water properties each time the float surfaces.

To ensure the floats are working correctly, UW’s Annie Wong, a research scientist and engineer in oceanography, developed a set of tools to assess what is being transmitted. All 22 countries involved in the Argo program have adopted Wong’s methodology and programs.

The challenge now that 3,000 floats are in the water is to continue replacing the ones that have reached the end of their useful lives, something that happens after about 4 ½ years, Riser says.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is very supportive of the replacement effort, Riser says. The $24 million the UW has received for Argo includes $16.5 million awarded by NOAA just last summer to schedule expeditions and replace floats through 2011. In the meantime officials are considering whether the Argo program should one day be run like the National Weather Service.

Satellites and instruments that monitor conditions at the sea surface — such as the moored buoys across the tropical Pacific used to detect changes preceding 1998’s devastating El Niño — have greatly improved climate forecasts in recent years.

A ÌìÃÀÓ°ÊÓ´«Ã½ oceanographer is in Washington, D.C., today for a press conference announcing the first phase of a program that could take climate forecasting to the next level of accuracy by routinely making measurements up to a mile beneath the sea surface at points across all the world’s oceans.

UW oceanographers and engineers are adapting and deploying more than half of the approximately 45 subsurface drifters expected to be in the water by the end of the year under the Argo program, named after the ship used by the mythological Greek hero Jason. Spearheaded with $4 million in initial support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Office of Naval Research, Argo is an ambitious program to deploy 3,000 specialized floats around the world. The United States has committed to provide at least a third of the floats during the next three years. Other countries, including Japan, Canada and Australia, also will launch floats.

“A global network of these floats would make it possible to understand the ocean’s impact on climate cycles and to improve forecasts of climate conditions,” says Stephen Riser, UW professor of oceanography.

NOAA has selected the UW, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to build the first floats and arrange for their deployment. All three institutions have successfully used similar floats in recent years for individual research projects and as a pilot for Argo. For example, Riser has used the floats in the Western Atlantic to measure the water temperature and velocity of currents in the ocean under hurricanes in an effort to determine how the ocean fuels or defuses a storm’s punch.

The floats are mechanical devices with electronic sensors and satellite antennas that drift about a mile below the sea surface and, every 10 days, ascend through the water collecting temperature and salinity data that they transmit via satellites to land-based laboratories. The floats can operate independently through their life of four to five years.

The UW launched its first five floats under the Argo program in June. The floats can be deployed from research vessels, container ships or even aircraft. Riser has arranged for four or five more to be set adrift in the South Pacific this month and next, and another eight to 16 in the Atlantic in November and December.

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For more information:
Stephen Riser, leave messages today and before 10 a.m. EDT on Wednesday at the Washington Plaza Hotel, (202) 842-1300; Riser returns to Seattle Wednesday afternoon, (206) 543-1187, riser@compass.ocean.washington.edu

Argo Web site: