CANBERRA: A new fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) has been deployed from Australia's Hobart to monitor the Southern Ocean and improve understanding of how much carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere is absorbed by the ocean surface.
The USVs will be deployed every quarter over five years to circumnavigate Antarctica, operating in the challenging conditions of the Southern Ocean, according to a statement released Thursday by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australia's national science agency.
The USVs are autonomous mobile research platforms, powered by wind and solar energy, and will operate in remote waters for months at a time, recording data in real time to better understand ocean carbon sinks, the statement said.
Each deployment is expected to cover about 22,000 km in the Southern Ocean, specifically to acquire data in seasons and regions where ship traffic is limited, said CSIRO Principal Research Scientist Elizabeth Shadwick.
The project is an international collaboration involving CSIRO, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, South Africa's Southern Ocean Carbon-Climate Observatory, among other partners.
Ocean sinks store about a third of the CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere each year, with the Southern Ocean accounting for 40 percent of global ocean CO2 uptake, according to CSIRO.
The USVs will collect continuous atmospheric and oceanographic observations, including atmospheric CO2, wind, temperature, sea surface temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen and seawater CO2, it said, adding that the research will contribute to the annual Global Carbon Budget, which quantifies sources and sinks of CO2 emissions. - Xinhua
