TOWARDS AN AUTONOMOUS GLOBAL OCEAN CARBON OBSERVATORY

Ocean acidification and circulation changes brought by increasing atmospheric CO2 will have profound but unpredictable impacts on the natural ocean biological carbon pump, a process that naturally transports ~10 Pg C y-1 to waters below 100 m. The stability of the pump is in question. Prediction of future changes in the ocean carbon cycle requires cost-effective all-weather all-season observations of biotic carbon flows on appropriate time and space scales. This presentation describes work to close the space/time gap in observations of biologically driven ocean carbon cycle processes. The ARGO program with 1000's of low-cost Lagrangian profiling floats operating at sea is providing sea-truth for simulations and forecasts of the climate state of the ocean. We have adapted floats for carbon observations. Since 2001, a dozen low-cost long-lived robotic Carbon Explorers (CE, optics and telemetry enhanced ARGO floats) have been deployed return real-time information on the daily variation of particulate organic carbon (POC) concentration and systematic changes in POC sedimentation to kilometer depths in the ocean (Bishop et al., 2002, 2004). 7 years of data now exist from the worlds most remote and stormy locations. A sensor for particulate inorganic carbon (PIC; Bisho