Measurements of surface ocean carbon dioxide partial pressure during WOCE

Progress during the past year of research under Measurements of Surface Ocean Carbon Dioxide Partial Pressure During WOCE'' has been significant. As was described in our previous progress report, the startup phase of this research was severely frustrated by delays in the US WOCE Hydrographic Program (WHP), which in turn were caused by delays in the mid-life refit of the R/V Knorr. As a result the high latitude southeastern Pacific work (WHP lines P19S and P16S) originally scheduled for the 1990 austral summer has still not been carried out. As a substitute, the smaller R/V Thomas Washington was pressed into service during mid-1991 to carry out lower-latitude portions of the WHP P16 and P17 lines - the TUNES Expedition. Because this ship is much smaller than the R/V Knorr, she could not carry a full complement of WHP programs and seagoing personnel and was restricted by her size and the time of year to lower-latitude work. Our original proposal for carbon dioxide measurements was designed to divide the work between legs in which we participated as part of the WHP dissolved CFC program (under separate NSF funding) and legs in which we entrusted the operation of our system to other CFC or carbon dioxide laboratories with expertise in gas chromatography. Since we were not involved in any CFC work on the substituted Washington expedition, and since all the seagoing programs on the Washington were additionally stressed by a shortage of people and space, this placed our carbon dioxide program at an unwelcome disadvantage. The preliminary results for carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide are shown. We are forced to rely on spotty manual observations and station CTD temperatures to reconstruct our equilibrator temperature solubility corrections for portions of that leg. We did not get our usual reliable data return, but the results were surely worth effort, especially for this vast and rarely-visited region of the world oceans