South Africa's observation capacity in the Southern Ocean now on international standard

CSIR oceanographer Dr Pedro Monteiro on board of the SA Agulhas in Cape Town harbour earlier this year.

When the SA Agulhas sets out on its annual trip to the Antarctic in December this year, it will have R6-million-worth of state-of-the-art equipment of the Southern Oceans Carbon and Climate Observatory programme on board.

The programme is a CSIR-led consortium, which, up to now, includes the University of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, the Department of Environmental Affairs and the Applied Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (ACCESS).

Funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and CSIR, the new equipment will enable the SA Agulhas to become a sampling platform of international standard. This investment in the carbon and climate capability of the Southern Ocean is closely linked with DST's Global Change Grand Challenge science plan and the equipment will later form part of the planned SA National Antarctic Programme (SANAP) and Polar Entity National Facility, including the new polar ship to be launched in February 2012.

According to programme leader and CSIR principal researcher Dr Pedro Monteiro, the international science challenge for the Southern Ocean is enormous.

"The Southern Ocean between South Africa and Antarctica is a body of ocean, the role of which in the climate of the earth and southern Africa is becoming increasingly apparent. However, at the same time scientists are realising how little they understand about how its carbon-climate feedback systems work. Presently global assessments of how much man-made CO₂ is taken up by the oceans have uncertainty levels of between 40% and 50% - and the Southern Ocean remains an important contributor to this level of uncertainty.

"We need uncertainty levels below 15% before the data become operationally useful to provide robust and helpful global assessments of the changing carbon cycle and its implications for the effectiveness of global greenhouse gas mitigation plans. This level has so far only been achieved in the North Atlantic. This is especially important because for the foreseeable future the changing terrestrial CO₂ sink can only be assessed as the difference between emissions, atmospheric build-up and the ocean sink. We need better observations to better understand how systems will change in response to global warming," he says.

The SA Agulhas will set out on 9 December with a team of ten scientists that includes seven postgraduate students lead by Dr Sandy Thomalla, a UCT/CSIR postdoctoral scientist, to undertake an annual detailed study of CO₂ fluxes and the physical and biogeochemical processes that affect those fluxes. The senior team includes CSIR's Dr Thato Mtshali and Dr Bob Scholes who will oversee the new specialised Iron Clean-Sampling Facility and Underway CO₂ and Ocean Productivity Systems on board.

This annual scientific observation and process study addresses not only the scientific questions of the programme, but also constitutes a long-term contribution of South African science to the global initiatives on observing how the earth systems are adjusting to global warming. Moreover, it is a platform for training of postgraduate students in advanced observational technology and earth systems science," Monteiro says.