Research Institutions

Princeton

Jorge Sarmiento is the Director of the program. The administrative aspects of the project will be headquartered at Princeton. Roberta Hotinski is the SOCCOM Project Manager and Bob Key coordinates SOCCOM shipboard data management.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography/UCSD

Lynne Talley leads Theme 1 - Observations, including cruise planning for deployment of the SOCCOM floats and observational analysis, which also involves SIO’s Sarah Gille. Analysis and modeling include the biogeochemical Southern Ocean State Estimate (B-SOSE), led by SIO’s Matt MazloffAriane Verdy and Bruce Cornuelle; B-SOSE is a general circulation model of the ocean that incorporates all available observational data, including biogeochemical data from the profiling floats, to provide a physically and biogeochemically realistic representation of the Southern Ocean.

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

Ken Johnson has led the development of the nitrate and high-pressure pH sensors that are used in the project and has been active in the development of biogeochemical floats. He is the Associate Director of the SOCCOM project and his lab supplies the University of Washington with sensors for the SOCCOM floats. Heidi Cullen leads an outreach effort to share data, technology and lessons learned from our research with the scientific community, industry partners, policymakers, and the general public.

University of Washington

Steve Riser and colleagues at UW build the floats from commercial components, integrate the BGC sensors, and perform extensive testing and calibration before shipping them to the cruises that will deploy them. He also has an extensive role in interpreting the float data. Riser has been making float observations since they were first introduced in WOCE, and has been involved with the global Argo program since its inception. His program at UW is currently one of the major float providers for Argo. He is co-leader of Theme 1.

University of Arizona

​Joellen Russell leads the Theme 2 - Modeling effort to use the new biogeochemical data to analyze and improve a new generation of high resolution (1/10°) earth system models to both increase our understanding of the Southern Ocean’s current workings and make better projections of the future trajectory of the Earth’s climate and biogeochemistry.

College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University

Laurie Juranek has partnered with NOAA to develop the algorithms that connect the properties observed by the float sensors to the full suite of carbon system parameters, critical to both the modeling and observational components of SOCCOM.

University of Maine & Rutgers University

Emmanuel Boss of the University of Maine and Oscar Schofield of Rutgers University have been funded by NASA (see below) to supply bio-optical sensors for SOCCOM floats to provide additional information on biological processes in the water column.

Partner Funding Institutions

In addition to our primary funding from the National Science Foundation, SOCCOM also receives support from NOAA and NASA.

NOAA

The U.S. Argo program has partnered with SOCCOM by supplying one half of the basic profiling floats, allowing SOCCOM to substantially increase the number of floats with biogeochemical sensors that are deployed per year. NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory runs high-resolution earth-system modelling experiments in support of the project. Two other NOAA labs are also collaborating scientifically on the SOCCOM project:

  • Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL)
  • Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory (AOML)

NASA

NASA has funded a complementary project led by investigators at the University of Maine and Rutgers University (see above) to supply SOCCOM floats with bio-optical sensors.