Ship Operations-R/V Robert Gordon Sproul

University Of California-San Diego Scripps Inst Of Oceanography, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Scripps proposes to continue operations of the research vessel Robert Gordon Sproul in support NSF-funded scientific research at sea in the year 2005. NSF-sponsored projects account for 40% of the work of the vessel for the year. The ship will spend 2005 along the Pacific coast from Mexico to central California, supporting eleven very different scientific programs, several of them involving more than one voyage. The total ship schedule in 2005 is 185 operating days. This is a five-year cooperative agreement, and funding for the years 2006-2009 will be renegotiated and will depend on the number of days at sea in support of NSF-funded research programs requiring the use of an Oceanographic platform. Broader Impacts: The primary impact of ship operations is on the education of many students, principally but not exclusively graduate students in the ocean sciences. The great majority of scientific parties on Scripps (and other UNOLS) ships contain students in their ranks. They form integral parts of the research teams. By going to sea they obtain firsthand experience of the conduct of seagoing research, they learn the difficulties that surround the gathering of meaningful observations from the real ocean, and they gain valuable preparation for leading their own research projects at sea in their future careers. In a particular educational effort during 2004 the ship supported a highly successful one-day experience of research at sea for a selected group of teachers participating in two-week summer workshop at SIO built around the scientific theme of plate tectonics and the practice-of-science theme of organizing and executing research at sea. The NSF ship operations program funded ship use; workshop funding was from the NSF/EAR/DUE/ERESE (Enduring Resources for Earth Science Education) program. Scripps also frequently receives inquiries from the public about volunteering to work at sea on a research vessel, often as a result of having browsed the marine (http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/shipsked/) or general institutional (http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/) websites. They maintain information about volunteering on the site, pointing such inquiries toward scheduled chief scientists who may have need of volunteer assistance. They have university procedures in place to enroll volunteers on behalf of projects headed by UC-affiliated investigators, thereby providing appropriate insurance coverage, etc. In cases when volunteers and projects do connect successfully, strong educational experiences arise that can awaken a continuing interest in the oceans and ocean science. Intellectual and Technical Merit: The intellectual merit of the proposed work is indirect. It derives from the intellectual merit of the individual research projects that depend upon the shipboard work at sea. For example, in 2005 the ship will support a NSF-funded effort (Checkley) to develop autonomous underwater instruments that sense zooplankton and their environment using a laser optical plankton counter. Development efforts of this kind are essential to create the future generations of instruments that can expand our ability to observe important ocean parameters, especially such hard-to-measure parameters as plankton distributions. Important biological and chemical variables have been terribly under sampled in the global ocean in the past because existing methods for these variables are so slow and labor-intensive. Successful developments of new systems mean that vessels can deploy and manage them when and where needed, multiplying the observing power of the ships by orders of magnitude. In this example, and in virtually every other significant development of new ocean observation methods, the work begins with small-scale local tests of candidate sensors and systems, only building to full-scale use and deployments much later. R/V Sproul has supported innumerable such tests, and is of a size, adaptable capability, scheduling flexibility and operational cost that make her an ideal, platform for such work, now and in the future.