Suggested Field Campaign •  2 North Atlantic cruises , 2 Station P cruises

•  Variability and signal are high, increasing the range of biological pump states oberved in a 1 month field campaign.

•  Long-term monitoring programs have already been established at the BATS and HOT locations, providing ample data diversity and coverage for characterizing the end-member condition of stable oligotrophic systems.

The EXPORTS field campaign will sample up to eight independent states of the biological pump.

•  An on-station duration of at least 5 days is needed accounting for sinking rate and depth.

•  10 day sampling time interval ~ time needed for assessing a single state of the biological pump.

•  During each month long field campaign, we expect to observe at least two “states” of the biological pump.

EXport Processes in the Ocean from RemoTe Sensing – EXPORTS Opportunity to Help Plan a NASA Field Campaign in Ocean Carbon Cycling Dave Siegel, Ken Buesseler & the EXPORTS Science & Implementation Plan Writing Team

Overall Goal of EXPORTS

To quantify & predict the consequences of planktonic ecosystem characteristics on the state of the ocean’s biological pump

Plankton ecosystem characteristics include food web structure and their spatiotemporal variability in the environment

Recent advances in the remote sensing of plankton patterns (PFT, PSD, etc.) & autonomous in situ tools make achieving our goal possible

Hypothesis: The biological pump can be quantified by observing surface ocean plankton patterns

Science Questions

Q1: How do plankton community composition and ecological-physical interactions determine the vertical transfer of organic matter from the well-lit surface ocean?

Q2: What controls the efficiency of vertical transfer of organic matter below the well-lit surface ocean?

Q3: How can knowledge gained from EXPORTS be used to reduce uncertainties in contemporary & future estimates of the biological pump?

A Scoping Study for a NASA field campaign

Will answer critical science questions for NASA and the nation

Important: NASA Field Campaigns are Competed and Community Driven Examples include ICESCAPES, SO-GasEx, LBA, etc.

Science & Implementation Plan due June 2014

If successful, Science Definition Team competed in 2015, EXPORTS Field program competed in 2016, & field program starting 2017

What is EXPORTS?

Implementation Plan

Numerical Modeling •  Essential to field campaign plan from beginning •  Synthetic data sets will be used to address the

major science questions

What’s Next?

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