The Southern Ocean in Global Climate: The ORCHESTRA Programme

The Southern Ocean accounts for around half of all oceanic uptake of carbon, and more than three-quarters of the heat uptake. Despite its profound importance, the Southern Ocean is also the least measured and arguably the least understood of the world's oceans: its remoteness and inhospitable nature have led to a dearth of sustained, strategic measurement programmes, and the small-scale and complexity of many of the key processes have precluded the desired advances in simulation. To address these issues, a new £10M programme funded by the United Kingdom NERC has now commenced - 'Ocean Regulation of Climate by Heat and Carbon Sequestration and Transports (ORCHESTRA)'. ORCHESTRA will span five years and use a combination of data collection, analyses, and computer simulations to radically improve our ability to measure, understand and predict the circulation of the Southern Ocean and its role in the global climate. It will make unique and important new measurements in the Southern Ocean using a range of techniques, including basin-wide ocean/carbon/tracer sections, as well as deployments of autonomous vehicles, meteorological aircraft, seal tagging and other innovative techniques for collecting data. It will also involve the development and use of advanced ocean and climate simulations, to improve our ability to predict climatic change in coming decades. This poster will outline the rationale, plans and key results from the ORCHESTRA programme.