i want to tell you today about the role of the oceans and climate and much of what we feel as far as climate goes has to do with the atmosphere the temperature of the atmosphere but it's important to realize that a very large part of the climate signal resides in the oceans so just to give you an example of what i mean if you think about the amount of heat that's contained in the oceans an atmosphere the oceans hold about a thousand times more heat than the atmosphere and that's simply because the mass of the oceans is so much greater than the atmosphere and the heat capacity of the oceans is is much larger similarly the oceans also hold much more carbon or dissolved carbon dioxide than the atmosphere so the oceans hold about fifty times as much dissolved carbon compared to the atmosphere so the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is very much controlled or regulated by the dissolved carbon in the oceans and similarly if you think about the water the oceans contain ninety six percent of all the water on the planet just about two percent isn't fresh one or two percent is fresh water two percent is in fact ice caps so the oceans play a really important rule for regulating the climate and what we feel in terms of the atmosphere but also the water and regulating water and the hydrological cycle and regulating the c o two in the atmosphere in regulating the oxygen in the atmosphere because of our ha half the primary production of the fixation of carbon through  oceans and that's something that we really need to realize today so what i wanted to tell you about today is really a research project that that i'm very much involved in along with the whole group of people it's a very collaborative project and science these days is done in groups of people so all my colleagues i owe them very much and also my students who play very keen our important role in this project and also the funding agencies so i start our knowledge in everyone and the we refers to everyone in this project and this project has to do with trying to better understand a region of the oceans which is relatively poorly understood it's the indian ocean the northern indian ocean is the focus of our study and this part of the oceans is particularly important because it supports a very important climate system the monsoons so the monsoons are an enormous breeze it's enormous land breeze in which or ocean land breeze in which the winds blow from the oceans onto the lands and some onto the land and some more and then the reverse the main winds completely reversed as a huge seasonal change in the win and along with the winds the circulation of the oceans reverse but these winds carry a huge amount of moisture with them and bring rainfall to a large part of asia to south asia and it's interesting to no that about half the world's population lives in that part of asia about one point five billion people depend on the monsoon for their assistance and the monsoons bring water to you know india and malaysian burma and pakistan and sri lanka and indonesia and there's also an australian monsoon so understanding this part of the climate system is very important because so much of the w population relies on it and as you might have guessed the oceans play a huge role in the monsoons because all the water that comes into the atmosphere is really coming from the oceans the oceans provide the heat in the that when you look at climate models today or models that predict the weather or the weather over the timescale of a season we found that climate models to a really poor job in this part of the world's oceans and this part of models for creating ocean that's a little bit too cold at the surface cold compared to observations and then that doesn't drive the right monsoon system so we started this project in collaboration with several countries it's a very international project and before you go into some region of the world's oceans it's really good to reach out to the countries in that region and we reached out in particular to india also to sri lanka and started this collaborative project with them which entails several countries around that region we the this project was funded by the office of naval research and it really brings cutting edge to try to understand this problem when we spoke to scientists in india they told us that prediction of the monsoons is a very major problem for them and one of the big concerns is the onset of the monsoon but also the the monsoon season of the summer monsoon season so the rainfall comes between june and august to september but it's highly variable so you might have a period of very high rainfall for about ten days then you have a dry spell then you have another intense period these are called active and break cycles and they see a strong correlation between surface temperature of the oceans and these active and break cycles so we really want to try and understand better what's happening here how the oceans feed  we go about this is that we had a plan we take all the data that's available as i said this part of the ocean is under sampled but through the world ocean observing programs that are in existence today there is data available there are floats which are in the ocean that are return a muslim making measurements and we are going to go to the float lab to see some of these floats and there is satellite data available from these oceans and we find that this part of the oceans is very unique it's very unique because it's one of the freshest oceans in the world and so why is it so fresh it's fresh because it gets an immense amount of rainfall if you want to look at global rainfall from a satellite so there's a lot of fresh water that's coming into the oceans and there's also an enormous amount of fresh water that comes from rivers in the surrounding regions of the rainfall that falls on the land and you have the himalayas the mountains which are blocking off  to mix the oceans and in most places ocean density is governed by temperature so you have warm water at the top the surface is heated by the sun and this little ring prevents the oceans from mixing very strongly when you we find that the freshwater creates a light layer on the surface and the density of that water is governed by the salinity your the freshness of the water rather than the temperature and so why does this matter it matters because the vertical structure of that word clearing of the ocean affects how he gets distributed so let me give you a thought experiment let me say that i have a region of the ocean in which this surface two hundred meters and then i have another region of the ocean in which i have a freshly or which is ten meters or twenty meters of the surface and now i start heating both these oceans with the sun in and so when you start heating the surface the heat gets more trapped in that surface layer and so you'll find that the surface temperature in these two regions of the ocean will actually differ even though the solar insolation is the same and this is in fact something that we know happens in the b of main goal saw during the summer when the sun is out and it's really warm in that part of the world the surface oceans heat up but the bay of bengal the temperature goes up very rapidly that increase in temperature so this is what you know i'm showing you what a salinity and density section temperature sex section looks like so by section i mean we're going along in a ship and we're making measurements in the vertical and we have a whole transect that we're making with the ship and that transect allows you to see what the definition density salinity of that ocean is now looking at that gives us some understanding of what the structure is but we really want to try and understand what is drive that structure and an important role here is of people who think about theories and models and put those models together and try to explain those structures so i'll give you an  an example of a model and my student goal here is working with this model now that it's a model which describes the circulation of the fault flow field in the ocean as a function of heating cooling winds and the initial temperature and less fresh and then we start cooling this in this case this model from the surface and this cooling of the model of the surface essentially takes out heat from the ocean surface of this is what you would find in winter and you see that that heat loss is distributed over a greater depth in the region where the surface ocean is mixed to greater depth that heat loss is confined to lesser depth when you have a very freshly or lying on top and so you start with a uniform temperature on top and now apply the same cooling to both parts of the model and what we find is that one part of the surface ocean gets cooler than the other part of the  clip from this model which will allow you to see in fact how the surface ocean is now responding the heat fluxes responding because of the difference living in the in this density which comes from the water at the surface so models such as these that are many kinds of models are also we also have models of the entire circulation of the bear and other people are working on these models but models such as this allows allow us to understand the measurements that we make in the bay how do we understand what the values of these off the years he fluxus are so one of the things i'm going to show you a little bit later today is these buoys that we put out in the instruments temperature and salinity measurements which are made at different depths and at the surface these buoys have instruments which measure the atmosphere and they can also measure the transfer of heat and moisture between the instrumented moring just last november we'll see how that morning is constructed in a little while and we'll be getting those measurements back later this year the morning is out for a year and we'll put it another morning and we'll try to keep cycling this morning so that we get continuous observations because getting observations over a period of time is very important in the oceans because oceans are not just static they are evolving in space and times are different parts of the oceans we measure different things but it's all very all the time in times of the same location things keep changing and this is why it's a difficult problem of having to measure both space and time and if you really want to understand how things are changing over some period of time particularly how warming global warming is affecting the oceans we need sustained observations and sustained observations over the period of several years actually costs a lot of money i mean having one of these single morning like this can run into million dollars so you can imagine how much it costs to maintain a morning for a year so besides the morning i'll tell you show you some other instruments today and  vessels later today and this these research vessels are specially outfitted with all kinds of cure they carry a lot of instruments the back of the research vessel has a special special crane i should say which from which you or instruments into the water and as the ship is going along in the water we the research crew works twenty four hours a day in shifts shifts because these crews are very expensive  off for research crews costs just for the ship cost something on the order of forty or fifty thousand dollars so you want to really maximize the measurements you get back from one of these research cruises you work throughout the day shift shifts you to make sure the data is code you want to make sure you get data all kinds of things can happen with and with the instruments in this particular study our cruises are our involving also scientists from india and and a large part of this effort is the collaboration the international collaboration because no one country can just monitor and measure the oceans emotions are vast and we really need a dream of an international effort in studying the oceans so it's our mission to try and involve these other countries and also to bring these cutting edge observations that we're pioneering through the funding of our national agencies to these other countries promoting the use of some of the equipment and learning also from their employer called knowledge about their oceans in this particular collaborative effort we're respecting what's called the economic exclusive zones of the country so every country has an economic exclusive zone it can get quite political so working with the host countries where in the region where you're working has a lot of advantages and the workforce also benefits them which which is very important so let's tell you a little bit about life on this research vessel this particular cruise that we are going on is very international we have people from out in great detail what we are going to do what instruments we're going to take how we're going to make the measurements what the crews track is what the crews plan is how many people are coming which scientists are going to do what who's going to be and what shift are several days and we're all coming together to make these observations at the end of the observations we all go way work on the data but we gather very often to talk and a lot is learnt through these meetings and discussion we sit around the table we talk in small groups we get together in larger meetings where people fly from across the country or meet in one place or meet through you know the internet we show our data to each other and different people a learning different things and really the sum and that being more than the individual parts of the collaborative aspects are really really important for this kind of study because however much we try to sample the ocean we are undersampling it it's just evolving all the time and we're getting measured some region we're trying to extrapolate with theory and models to other parts of the ocean to understand how it works now when we're actually in the ship so once we go to this other country where we're going to make the measurements there's some formality all the equipment has to be shipped ahead of time we've already sent a container ahead from scripts so all the different institutions right now of the study there's seven or eight  universities within the us another seven or eight institutions in india we pulled all out for them and together we said to scripts a container ship from scripts and it would board the research vessel research vessels are all the time involved and would board the research wessel there will be out for four weeks starting mid august and have a plan of action we're bringing several instruments and making something called underway c t d that means temperature and then we also have acoustic measurements what's called a d c p at the bottom of the ship which measures the velocity of the speed of currents and then we deploy a lot of autonomous instruments which we throw leaves in the ocean we deploy them in the ocean and these instruments between making measurements some of them will be left there for six months at a time for a year of the time we go back and collect them at the next cruise or our indian partners will go out and collect some of these instruments and some of the instruments we deploy while we're on the cruise and then bring them back with us there's a crane there are several cranes on the ship the instruments i'm told from the crane there's something called a c t deal drugs it which has  is also unique for example that we have been goal is an oxygen minimum zone where oxygen is very depleted and we're trying to understand how that happens and then there are various labs in the ship so there's a computer lab where all the different streams of data are coming in we see them on the monitor in real time and people have to make measured decisions so we have to make sure the data is cold that all the instruments are working at all times but at the same time we also have to make this issuance as to where we couldn't go should we change our observational plan should we make follow a feature or shall we go to region which we're seeing lots of difference since the density or where the velocity is higher or sometimes we have to change our plans because of a storm so the last time we mixing people are analyzing the chemistry of the water people are making biological measurements of oxygen for wrestlers will be taking water samples to look at what kinds of fire plankton communities live there and we also measure the atmospheric where  some of times can be told behind the ship for example we can drop a probe which measures temperature and salinity to pull it back into keep dropping it so that as the ship is moving along every three or four kilometers we're getting a  shifts to make sure that everything is going as planned at the end of the day people get together for a meal and we sit around typically and talk about what's we've seen that the or talk about each other science that we  everyone and try to you know really further our scientific learning as a group as i said that's an important part of this research and we also do it on the ship when we are at sea but what i'm working on in the study is trying to understand the dynamics of the upper ocean the dynamics in response to input of solar energy and in response to this fresh water that's coming out of the bay the threshold of light comes out of the big not only creates a living in the currents and eddies so the ocean is very dynamic at all scales you have currents and eddies at large scales but you have swirling motions and eddies that are occurring on scales of thousand kilometers hundred kilometers coming all in the northern part of the v out into the southern part of the be at the same time affecting this density structure so that it has an effect on the air c fluxes of heat and moisture and that feeds back into effect in the monsoons so our long term goal for understanding these processes once we understand these processes better we can incorporate them into models that cannot resolve these very small scales by small i mean kilometer skills that we're able to look at with these special models and these special tools of observing the climate models are have grids or spacings of about you know degree in latitude longitude that's about thirty kilometers so they don't capture all the smaller scale processes but we are able to understand them now much better and are starting to understand them through these observations and modeling and our next step would be to try and take these this understanding put it back in the climate models and improve their ability to forecast predict the oceans temperature and the shipping containers with forklifts to be shipped off to the crew's destination so these are the buoys that that we use a there's a big square hole in the top of this buoy it's two point eight metre buoy so about ten feet across and inside that big square hole we'll put one of these we call them buoy wells so it's these big steel boxes will be field filled with batteries essentially and computers and then on the buoy top will have instruments and over here you can see an instrument a buoy that we're testing so we call this burnin and we we run these instruments for about a month to test that they're working before they go into the field and so our group measures surface meteorology from these buoys and the goal of that is to understand the exchange of heat and moisture between the ocean atmosphere and the exchange of momentum from the wind pushing the ocean and so we're measuring solar radiation infrared radiation that comes down from the atmosphere at c temperature and currents we're measuring the winds humidity air temperature and from these things we can combine these measurements to estimate the exchange of heat and momentum and the evaporation from the sea surface we're measuring the rainfall with rain gauges and the blue will stay out in place for about a year so tom just showed you one of our surface moorings  the series one of the pieces of instrumentation that we have clamped along the moring line and this measures subsurface currents this is a vector measuring current meter and you can see that it's have a whole rack of them right here and this is probably one of the most measured parameters in our morning is the temperature and conductivity with temperature and conductivity we're able to determine the salinity of the water bodies and that is one of the most important measurements that we make though these are autonomous underwater gliders one one variety of them anyways so what they are  are platforms for us to attach a lot of bunch of instruments to and what they do is a platform is go up and down through the water so they're able to change their buoyancy they do that by moving water or air in and out of the pressure case or in and out of the hall and then changing their volume that changes cause them to rise or fall in the water column and as they do that they're able to pitch their nose down as they're decent thing and up is there a sending and that lets them go through the water in a zigzag path like this so every time they come to the surface they're able to communicate in these gliders there are antennas for g p s and satellite communications in the tail so they come up to the surface and they stick the tail up in the air and then they can send back data they can get new commands from us and they do that once every few hours typically depending on how deep they're diving as far as the types of measurements they make all of these sliders measure temperature and salinity profiles they're also able to make vehicles are typically able to be deployed for weeks to months at a time depending on the type of batteries we put in them so in that time they can cover hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the water they don't go very quickly they only go about half a not  about walking speed or even less than walking speed but because they can stay out so long they can cover a long distance over all these gliders are a great tool for giving us long duration high resolution measurements out in the that we don't have to be there to collect them and they send back the data in real time so we have the data coming back to us all the time when we're able to put a fleet of these out like we're planning to do in the arabian sea we can collect lots of data from lots of places we can plan together in different kinds of patterns and click pretty unique data se so this is a our go profiling float it's an instrument that measures temperature and salinity in the water currently there are over three thousand of these in the world's ocean it's part of the argo program which is an international program to see the world's ocean with many of these to try to provide global coverage of measurements of the upper ocean temperature and salinity the flow to soft consists of  sensor at the top which is the part that actually measures the water properties and then the rest of it is a hydraulic system that makes the float go up and down in the water column these floats are capable of profiling the top two kilometers of the ocean which is roughly about half of the ocean they go out we can program them with different missions most of ours profile once every ten days and that's chosen as a time period that meshes well with ocean variability and maximizes how long the folks last in the water are folks typically last from four to five years and we've had some last seven to eight years so they're very long term missions when we put them out the technology is very much like the glider technology except it's simpler we've taken the wings off and instead of gliding around we just go up and down horizontally we drift wherever the currents take the float  but by making things simpler we reduce the cost and that's why we can get so many in the water the ocean is always been poorly sampled or under sampled and by and having an instrument that we can deploy in large numbers we get many of them into the ocean most of the time the flow is down at a thousand meters depth in the ocean and there's not much going on there these floats only spend about fifteen minutes at the surface they need that time to get a g p s fix really know where they are and then there's the antenna here which transmits the data back to us via satellite network and that all takes place in about ten to fifteen minutes depending on how much data there is and then the float sinks back down so we try to minimize the time at the surface both for avoiding obstacles and also before avoiding fouling of the sensor there's lots of biology at the surface when we're deep there's less concerns about bio fouling of the the sensors themselves so one of the strengths of the argo program is that it's an international program and all the data that we collect is publicly available in near real time usually within twenty four hours of the profile actually being recorded by instrument the data is placed at a public web site and anybody has access to that data and can use it either for their scientific research or for weather of our action takes place as you can see the deck has a bolt pattern which allows us to made up any equipment wenches of any variety and bring it to any ship in the us research fleet and bolt to right down to the of operations most anything that goes is deployed from the noise stern goes out from this a frame that can be towed or vertically dropped we deploy a wide variety of a quick mint from the nor it can be as diverse as a vertical cast c t d rose that to an aerial drone that has to be launched and recovered on our backs all of these things can happen in the course of a month because of north versatility as a general oceanographic vessel she's not we also have what's called dynamic positioning if you see here behind me you'll note an absence of a large ships we'll we have several smaller controls on our helm which control the control surfaces that make up our dan hammock positioning system what dynamic positioning is that essentially allows the ship to stay in one geographic position as we conduct research it also allows the ship to be extremely maneuverable which makes docking which normally requires complex maneuvers greatly simplifies the process other things that are controlled from this bridge all communications that come in the command of the vessel one underway and when conducting operations and you'll also notice a few things that look a little bit out of place such as this navy style entered in the sound powered farm this is essentially a highly engineered version of two cups in a string and it's the way we communicate on the vessel  conditions and we're hoping to use that data and combine it with modeling data to better understand approaching the structure and its