The Source and Fate of Primary Production in Relation to Carbon Fluxes on NOAA's Long Line Cruises

Francisco Chavez, Sarah Lyons, Reiko Michisaki, Tim Pennington, Peter Walz   

N96S: Southern Ocean Winter 1996

This N96S Southern Ocean cruise took place aboard the NOAA R/V DISCOVERER during an 8 week period, from January 9 to March 7, 1996. The ship travelled along 170°W from 66°S to 1°S. For further details on this cruise please refer to the implementation plan at http://jgofswww.whoi.edu/so-implementation.html. 

The cruise tracks and station locations are shown in the figure below. 
 

This cruise supports research funded by the NOAA Office of Global Programs (OGP) under the Ocean-Atmosphere Carbon Exchange Study (OACES), World Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS). The goal of the OACES project is to determine the source and sink regions of CO2 in the Equatorial and North Atlantic during the summer. Baseline of total carbon inventory in this region was established such that the uptake rate of atmospheric CO2 can be determined for future cruises. Our contribution to this project was to enhance the observations relevant to climate and global change with measurements of primary and new production in an attempt to quantify the effects of the biological system on the carbon and nitrogen cycle. 

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