CPO’s Climate Observations and Monitoring (COM) program and Climate Variability and Predictability (CVP) program, in partnership with NOAA’s Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing (GOMO) program, are announcing 12 new three-year projects in Fiscal Year 2021 that aim to increase the use and value of ocean observations, advance our understanding of climate variability and change, and enhance NOAA’s ability to model and predict the Earth System. The competitively selected 12 projects total $5.16 Million, including $3.5M in grants and $1.66M in other awards.

Observations are a foundational element of the climate research and services enterprise. In the last few years, reports by the National Academies of Science, the ocean observing community and CPO’s Earth System Science and Modeling Division’s community have called on observationalists, modelers, and data assimilation practitioners to improve the use of existing observations, and to jointly consider physical, chemical, and biological processes operating at different scales. Reports also highlighted that many autonomous and emerging ocean observations are underutilized, including potential future biogeochemical ocean observations prioritized in NOAA’s Science Advisory Board’s Subseasonal to Seasonal to Decadal report, and others.

With the advent of new methods, approaches, and technologies, coupled with the unprecedented rate of global change, the Climate Program Office has the opportunity to support research and facilitate partnerships across the external and NOAA communities that will increase the use of NOAA’s observations in advancing detection of changes in the atmosphere and ocean, and understanding of the earth system⁷. This work will ultimately help further monitoring, detection, and prediction of the earth system for societal applications central to NOAA’s mission.

To help bridge these gaps, COM, CVP, and GOMO issued a call soliciting research projects that will increase the usefulness of NOAA observations to the NOAA observing, modeling and/or satellite communities, and/or the broader scientific community.

The selected projects feature research that include data integration from past field campaigns, innovative methods (such as machine learning) that leverage emerging observations, and new ways to make observations more accessible. New approaches to climate monitoring, developing and improving databases, and bridging the gap between research and applications are also on the forefront of this year’s researchers.

Three of the 12 new projects include University of Washington researchers including:

• Biogeochemical Argo Calibration Algorithms
  • Biogeochemical Argo (BGC) floats have a great potential to revolutionize the collection of data to monitor the ocean carbon cycle as well as ongoing climate changes in the ocean such as global ocean warming and acidification. The expanding array of BGC Argo floats relies on data products built from ongoing hydrographic investigations for calibration and validation. This project will develop a new and expanded data product that will help in realizing the full potential of the BGC float observing strategy.
  • PI: Brendan Carter, University of Washington – CICOES
  • Co-PI(s): Richard Feely, Andrea Fassbender, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)
• Air-Sea Fluxes Derived from Global Surface and Field Campaign Observations: A Key Product for Improving Earth System and Climate Models
  • Air-sea fluxes are of critical importance as they represent and control the energy and water cycle of the Earth system. However, the current ability of observing air-sea fluxes globally is limited and remains as an unmet challenge. This project will develop an observation-based air-sea fluxes data product, which will integrate observations from existing surface-based networks (e.g., ocean moorings, ships and saildrones), selected satellite measurements, and field campaigns from 1990-2020.
  • PI: Shuyi Chen, University of Washington
  • Co-PI: Chris Fairall, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories – Physical Sciences Laboratory (ESRL – PSL)
• An Air-sea Flux, SST, Wave Database from the ATOMIC Field Program
  • The ATOMIC 2020 field campaign in the northwestern tropical Atlantic Ocean collected a unique and diverse dataset of air-sea interaction, ocean properties, and clouds. This project, a data synthesis effort, will produce an effective and lasting use of ATOMIC field campaign observations for evaluating satellite and reanalysis products and use in numerical models. The project will utilize data from ATOMIC and the larger umbrella field campaign EUREC4A, for the most complete picture to produce and archive a combined, consistently quality controlled, and consistently processed database from all platforms. Field campaigns are designed to collect in-situ data that both improve process level understanding and for benchmarks datasets used for identifying improvements of reanalysis, satellite data, and models. Databases for SST, air-sea fluxes, waves, plus near surface bulk variables that result from this effort will be posted to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) for public distribution.
  • PI: Elizabeth J. Thompson, NOAA / PSL
  • Co-PI: Darren Jackson, University of Colorado – Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) / NOAA PSL; Christopher W. Fairall, NOAA PSL; Dongxiao Zhang, University of Washington – CICOES / NOAA PMEL