About the Le Commandant Charcot
Le Commandant Charcot is an icebreaking cruise ship operated by the French operator: Compagnie du Ponant. It is a Polar Class 2 rated icebreaking vessel capable of reaching remote polar destinations such as the Geographic North Pole. She features a hybrid power plant powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG) and 5 MWh electric batteries, capable of briefly driving the ship without engines running. Le Commandant Charcot is a unique cruise expedition vessel designed for extreme polar conditions that give the rare opportunity to 270 passengers to explore remote polar areas. Since the beginning of the project, Ponant has designed the vessel as “a Ship of Opportunity” for the scientific community. It has a dedicated infrastructure for making measurements, experiments and has autonomous data acquisition available for researchers. The Ponant Science Program has a dedicated science coordinator onboard for the maintenance and operation of the different instruments.
In April of 2022, in collaboration with Ponant and Dr. Nicolas Cassar of Duke University in Durham, NC, our group installed an autonomous instrument on this vessel to measure CO2 in the surface water and the overlaying atmosphere above it. The unique geographic areas that the ship will visit are rarely sampled and will provide a unique data set that will further our understanding of the carbonate system in high latitude regions.
About this Website
This web site provides access to the fugacity of CO2 (fCO2) data collected on this ship. Note, fCO2 is the partial pressure pCO2 corrected for non-ideality of the CO2 gas; they are numerically similar (fCO2 ≃ 0.995 pCO2). The processed data are organized by year and by cruise. For each cruise, the color coded fCO2 values are plotted along the ship's cruise track on a chart. Next to each chart are links to the comma-delimited data file and the associated Readme file. To download a data file, select the year from the drop-down list box and click on GO. Choose a chart and cruise, right-click on the link to its data file or Readme file, and select the download option. Please consult with and acknowledge the AOML Ocean Carbon Cycle group if data is used for publication or presentation (contacts in Master Readme, or Denis.Pierrot@noaa.gov).
The Master Readme link in the menu bar on the left provides meta data that is applicable for all data gathered from this ship. The individual Readme files next to the charts provide meta data specific to the associated cruise. The Realtime Display link displays plots of the raw xCO2 data as a function of time and location. These plots are suitable for monitoring but are not suitable for environmental interpretation since the Realtime data has not been processed nor quality controlled.