Support for the U. S. GEOTRACES Project Office

Columbia University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports two years of funding for the U.S. GEOTRACES Project Office to coordinate and support the activities of investigators at U.S. institutions who are fulfilling the GEOTRACES mission, specifically: “To identify processes and quantify fluxes that control the distributions of key trace elements and isotopes (TEIs) in the ocean, and to establish the sensitivity of these distributions to changing environmental conditions.” To fulfill this mission, and achieve benefits derived from doing so, GEOTRACES is making observations spanning a global array of ocean sections in close collaboration with modeling and synthesis, and supported by a solid foundation of ongoing intercalibration of analytical methods. A program-wide data management system ensures that the results of the program will live long after the program is completed. The US GEOTRACES program is at a time of transition, having recently completed its final section cruise and looking to embark on targeted “process” studies while emphasizing synthesis of GEOTRACES findings. This award provides support for Project Office personnel, for workshops and activities contributing to broader GEOTRACES synthesis, and for activities that facilitate the use of GEOTRACES products by the broader scientific community as well as learners, educators, policy makers, and other stakeholders. U.S. GEOTRACES has completed its prioritized sequence of ocean sections, resulting in over 500 papers, with many more to come. Data are archived at the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office and incorporated into an international database. Data are freely available for anyone to use, as are software tools to facilitate its use. This award will enable the U.S. GEOTRACES Project Office to continue coordinating the implementation of future process studies and to provide a research framework from planning through sampling to data synthesis. At this phase of the Program, a major priority is synthesis, that is, to interpret measured distributions of TEIs with the goal of identifying the principal sources of TEIs in the ocean, quantifying the rates of processes that regulate TEI supply and removal, and assessing the role of TEIs in biogeochemical cycles of carbon and major nutrients. This often requires going beyond disciplinary and national boundaries. The Project Office will continue to promote and facilitate these activities through a combination of large synthesis meetings and smaller synthesis working groups. The Project Office will engage in a multipronged effort to broaden the use of GEOTRACES findings, including: 1) distributing newsletters to the US oceanographic community and identifying opportunities within GEOTRACES to encourage the use of its data; 2) training early career scientists and giving them the tools to lead similarly large programs in the future; and 3) leveraging the selection of GEOTRACES within the UN Decade of Ocean Science to assist emerging oceanographic programs establish policies and procedures aimed at achieving the best possible data management systems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.