Data Gathering: Ocean Carbon Cycle – Sea-Air CO₂ Fluxes

The Ship of Opportunity Program (SOOP) mission is to provide a global platform to deploy and operate oceanographic instrumentation from research vessels and cargo ships. In the SOOP program, four NOAA investigators and three academic principal investigators have outfitted fifteen research and commercial vessels with automated carbon dioxide analyzers as well as thermosalinographs (TSGs) to measure the temperature, salinity and partial pressure of CO2 (pCO2) in surface water and air in order to determine the carbon exchange between the ocean and atmosphere.

NOAA’s Ocean Observing and Monitoring Division (OOMD) supports the largest ship of opportunity pCO2 measurement campaign in the world comprised of 15 ships of opportunity with automated CO2 systems in FY23. About 550,000 new observations were collected in this fiscal year.