SNOMS

Scenes from work in Vancouver October 2011

2011-10-31T15:00:00.003Z

Jon and Zongpei serviced the SNOMS system during a busy day on 28 October. The ProCO2 units had to be checked after removal from the tank and before being put into the tank shown in the picture below.

The friendly crew on the Pacific Celebes have always been a great asset to the SNOMS project.
The samples they have collected need to be checked and prepared for sending back to the UK for analysis.

Zongpei to visit NOAA PMEL in Seattle

2011-10-27T09:09:00.003+01:00

Zongpei will be presenting his work with ships of opportunity at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December. He will then visit Richard Feely at NOAA to work on comparison of the SNOMS data with that collected by NOAA along a very similar route since 2004. The NOAA data are collected less frequently
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Long+Beach+to+New+Zealand. After a gap of two years NOAA started work again using the Hamburg Sud Natalie Schulte in
September 2010. One target of work in the Pacific is to use the ship of opportunity data in providing regularly updated basin wide estimates of CO2 fluxes.

Zongpei Jiang is a PhD student at NOC-University of Southampton. He is funded by the Swire Educational Trust (2009 to 2013) and supervised by David Hydes and Toby Tyrrell at NOC and by Minhan Dai at the University of Xiamen.

Work with the east coast as well

2011-10-27T08:54:00.002+01:00

David Hydes is currently passing on the knowledge gained using the SNOMS flow through tank to Doug Wallace at the University of Dalhousie and Cyril Dempsey of Satlantic. Dalhousie and Satlantic are based in Halifax, Nova Scotia along with Bruce Johnson's company ProOceanus who make the CO2Pro and GTD units used in the SNOMS system.

Vancouver work and visit to IOS

2011-10-26T16:22:00.002+01:00

Tomorrow Jon Campbell and Zongpei Jiang fly out to Vancouver to service the system on the Pacific Celebes. After working on the ship Zongpei will then visit Jim Christian at the Institute of Ocean Science on Vancouver Island. They will start work on comparison of the SNOMS data with IOS data sets.

Input to Australian Data Sets

2011-10-24T09:26:00.002+01:00

Plans are now underway for transfer of the sea surface temperature data from the Pacific Celebes in the Australian Weather Bureau's system
http://imos.org.au/sst.html.
This will be working with Helen Beggs group in Melbourne. They will automatically capture the data every six hours when it is sent from the ship.

2011-10-18T13:45:00.002+01:00

October 2011

Boris has now moved the Australian Weather Bureau in Melbourne, Australia. This has lead to discussions with Ann Thresher at CSIRO about using the Celebes as a platform for launching XBTs. The data that these would provide on the underlying water structure would be very valuable to us.

2010-10-05T12:52:00.003+01:00

We are delighted to announce that the SNOMS data collected by the crew of the MV Pacific Celebes are now available on line via CDIAC (the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center). CDIAC is the primary climate change data and information analysis centre for the global fleet of vessels collecting CO2 data.

The data are available here.

Robert Woods CBE visits NOCS to discuss Ships of Opportunity

2010-01-25T15:59:00.004Z

Dr Boris Kelly-Gerreyn, Robert Woods CBE, Joanne Donahoe, Prof. Ed Hill (Director, NOCS)

On Friday 22 January Mr Robert Woods CBE met with Ed Hill, Boris Kelly-Gerreyn and Joanne Donahoe for a tour of the National Oceanography Centre and presentation on Ships of Opportunity Research. Robert Woods is a well-known figure in the shipping world. He is Chairman of P&O Ferries, a special advisor to DP World and P&F World FZE, he serves on the Swire Board and is Chairman of Southampton Container Terminals. His visit to NOCS comes on the heels of numerous conversations between the Centre and shipping industry leaders about Ships of Opportunity (SOO’s) research. The Swire Group has been funding research on their cargo vessel the Pacific Celebes since 2006. Interest from the industry to get involved in SOO’s is high and we hope will lead to the creation of the world’s first industrially-funded group supporting ocean research on commercial vessels. For more information please speak with Dr Boris Kelly-Gerreyn (bag@noc.soton.ac.uk)

38,000 Mile Service in Vancouver

2009-12-08T10:57:00.005Z

On 24th November Jon Campbell flew to Vancouver to spend two days servicing the SNOMS system. The Pacific Celebes has sailed more than 38,000 nautical miles since the system was last serviced in Livorno. Jon was able to catch up what had been happening to the ship since then and also was able to introduce the system to two visitors from the local Institute of Ocean Sciences on Vancouver Island- Jim Christian and Marty Davelaar. The team at IOS have many years experience in investigating processes controlling concentrations of carbon dioxide in the North Pacific and were very interested in the new approaches being used in the SNOMS system on the Pacific Celebes.

Engineering cadet Erjun Ren in the picture below has been collecting our daily seawater samples and provided Jon valuable assistance with the servicing. He is shown here with the ProOceanus CO2Pro freshly removed from the SNOMS tank
On the second day it stopped raining and Jon was able to work on the outside equipment and take this picture of Vancouver across the harbour
The ProOceanus CO2Pro sensor was reluctant to be opened so some of the Celebes’s engineers are seen below applying a little ‘persuasion’ to get it open.

Normally all we find in the tank is water and a little mud on occasion, but this time some unfortunate little fish had found their way into the SNOMS tank during the short voyage from the Columbia River to Vancouver.

Robert Cutler from Swire Education Trust tours NOCS and meets new Vice-Chancellor

2009-09-17T11:28:00.007+01:00

From left to right: Boris Kelly-Gerreyn, Robert Cutler, Joanne Donahoe, Ed Hill

We were delighted to welcome Robert Cutler from the Swire Educational Trust to NOCS on Friday 11th September 2009. Robert toured the centre with Professor Ed Hill (Director of NOCS), Joanne Donahoe (Associate Director, Development Office) and Dr Boris Kelly-Gerreyn (Project Manager of SNOMS). Part of the tour included a video conferencing session with our partners at the University of Xiamen (China). Robert was introduced to Professor Minhan Dai and the new Swire PhD student, Zongpei Jiang. The Swire Educational Trust are generously funding Zongpei's 4 year PhD studentship which will bring him over to NOCS for his first three years to work on SNOMS data. This marks the start of an excellent collaboration between Southampton and Xiamen.

During the tour, Robert was joined by Dr David Hydes (Chief scientist of SNOMS) and Professor John Shepherd FRS. After the tour, Robert met with the new vice-chancellor Professor Don Nutbeam.

The visit was deemed a great success by all involved.

New route and new collaboration

2009-09-17T10:35:00.004+01:00

When she gets to Singapore later this month the Pacific Celebes will start work on new route between west coast Canada and USA and Australia and New Zealand.

At the end of October she will arrive on Tauranga for the first time. The new route has resulted in new collaboration for the SNOMS project with Dr. Kim Currie from NIWA.
Kim is very keen to be involved, and is looking forward to the next step - perhaps a ship visit at Tauranga at the end of October.

Kim is an expert in the high-precision in situ pCO2 determination in surface seawater, and general carbon dioxide chemistry of seawater in the NZ region. Her work is part of a joint University of Otago-NIWA programme investigating, the CO2 chemistry of the New Zealand oceanic region. It aims to develop a better predictive capability for the role of this oceanic region as a sink for fossil fuel CO2.

Work in Livorno August 2009

2009-08-28T13:33:00.010+01:00

Tuesday 18th August 2009

The Pacific Celebes arrived in Livorno where Jon Campbell and Mark Hartman were waiting to service the SNOMS system. During a very busy 10 hours on board most of the system’s sensors were replaced with new or re-calibrated units.

Mark replacing the temperature, conductivity and oxygen sensors in the lid of the SNOMS tank.

Engineers Ren and Guo checking the seawater samples with Mark.

A new Vaisala air temperature, pressure and humidity sensor was installed on the bridge top.

A vast array of marine organisms are to be found in Livorno’s famous fish market!

2009-06-23T15:25:00.004+01:00

The Pacific Celebes is now well on its way across the Atlantic and is about 10 days away from Camden. Chief Engineer Liang Chuan has just sent this picture of the current sampling team
From left to right
E/cadet -- Xie Yao Yun
C/E -- Liang Chuan
2/E -- Fan Yue Jun
5/E -- Guo Hong Sheng

2009-06-12T22:56:00.001+01:00

Sailing on its new route the MV Pacific Celebes has just rounded the Cape of Good Hope for the first time. She should have passed with in sight of Cape Town and Table Mountain yesterday.

Data from the Indian Ocean show in water pCO2 levels about 20 mico-atmospheres lower than expected from the predictions of the Taro Takahashi’s global atlas of surface pCO2 values (Takahashi et al., Deep Sea Research II; doi:10.1016/j.dsr2.2008.12.009).

Position of MV Pacific Celebes Updated at 06:50UTC On 12 Jun 2009 (Day 163).

2009-06-01T22:55:00.001+01:00

We are very pleased to say that the Swire Educational Trust has agreed to support a PhD student to work with the SNOMS project. The student will come from the University of Xiamen in China and be based for his degree at the University of Southampton. He will be co-supervised by David Hydes and Toby Tyrrell (at NOC) and by Minhan Dai (MEL, Xiamen).

The student Zongpei Jiang is currently writing his MSc thesis in Xiamen and will start his studies in Southampton in October.

Image: SNOMS student Zongpei Jiang at work in the University of Xiamen

2009-05-21T22:52:00.000+01:00

The MV Pacific Celebes, sailed from Jakarta on its new route which will take it to the Gulf of Mexico via the Cape of Good Hope. This will take about 38 days.

2009-04-22T22:50:00.001+01:00

Each day the MV Pacific Celebes is at sea the crew collect a water sample which is stored on board and then sent back to NOC. At NOC the sample is analysed to measure the total alkalinity (TA) and the total amount of carbonate (DIC) compounds dissolved in the sample. From this data the pCO2 value of the water can be calculated.

This data is interesting in its own right as it provides information on the oceans capacity to absorb CO2. Initially we are using it to validate the performance of the underway measurements of pCO2. In April we completed a scientific paper on the performance of the system, this has been submitted to the scientific journal Deep Sea Research.

Image: Rebecca Garley working at NOC with the equipment that measures TA and DIC.

2009-03-10T22:47:00.000Z

Jon Campbell visited the MV Pacific Celebes when she was in St John, Canada to check the system and fit a set of freshly calibrated sensors. The visit went well even if as the photograph below show work on deck was chilly.