Using Animal-borne Instruments (ABI) to sample coastal areas of the Southern Ocean

Lead PI: Dr. Luis A. Huckstadt

Sustained physical and biological observations are crucial to understanding, predicting, and mitigating the effects of anthropogenic stressors in a rapidly changing ocean. A variety of oceanographic variables (e.g. temperature, salinity, light, and chlorophyll fluorescence) are routinely measured by a large array of sampling platforms from Argo floats to satellites; further sampling methods and platforms are needed to better meet global ocean observing needs.

Deploying tracking tags on marine megafauna (Animal-Borne Instruments, ABI) offers a valuable supplement to more traditional ocean observing methods, providing data from remote regions at a relatively low cost that are valuable contributions to multiple Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) under the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS).

Our main goal is to assess the feasibility of using existing (but previously unexplored) high-resolution datasets collected by diving predators (water column temperature and light penetration data) to describe oceanographic variability in data-deficient coastal areas of the Southern Ocean.

We will focus on a large set of animal-borne data collected in the Southern Ocean by a diverse community of air-breathing predators. We will collate the different datasets, assess their quality and assign locations to the temperature and light profiles based on the animals’ moving data. The data will then be analyzed to determine their potential for oceanographic investigations, such as variability in mixed layer depth, fresh (melt) water intrusions, and light penetration (euphotic layer), among others.

Graduate Student:

Theresa Keates - Department of Ocean Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz

​Collaborators: 

Dr. Michael Goebel - Insitute of Marine Sciences, University of California Santa Cruz

Dr. Christophe Guinet - CNRS, France

Dr. Mark Hindell - Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, University of Tasmania

Dr. Clive McMahon -  Sydney Institute of Marine Science and Australian Integrated Marine Observing System, IMOS