Argo floats are autonomous profiling vehicles that adjust their buoyancy to profile once every ten days, spending the majority of their time at ~1000 m depth before diving to 2000 m, then rising to the ocean surface while measuring water and transmitting their data via satellite. Biogeochemical sensors are being added to select Argo floats in ever increasing numbers. Much of my work has focused on improving biogeochemical sensor performance and how to use these novel data to better understand and constrain cycling and fluxes of tracers such as oxygen and carbon.
Net Community Production
To interpret upper ocean oxygen data, I developed an upper ocean gas model. I have used this model to calculate net community production, which is equivalent to the organic carbon produced in the surface ocean and exported out of contact with the atmosphere. This model is a quasi-1-dimensional model that we use to calculate the physical influences on upper ocean gas data. Changes in oxygen in the upper ocean are due to a combination of physical and biological processes. If we can model the physical influences on oxygen, we can isolate the biological signal to better understand the role of biology in the ocean’s carbon cycle (Bushinsky and Emerson, 2015; Yang, Emerson, and Bushinsky, 2017).
This model can also be used to test gas exchange parameterizations using in situ measurements of relatively abiotic gases, such as nitrogen and argon.