The uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ from the atmosphere produces a global decrease in ocean pH, a process known as ocean acidification. To quantify changes, in-situ sensors are deployed to measure carbonate chemistry in addition to discrete laboratory-based measurements being taken on research cruises. This creates a currently unfulfilled need to ‘intercalibrate’ or validate the various types of data. The need for intercalibration of data is an inherently international problem and improving communication between universities across countries has the exciting potential to uncover new answers to the intercalibration challenges currently being discussed in the ocean carbon monitoring community. With the help of the LOREX international exchange program, I will visit Dalhousie University and begin an exchange of science between Nova Scotia and Irvine. I plan to investigate the offsets in spectrophotometric pH measurements taken by my collaborators at Dalhousie University with a new marine CO₂₂-system solver that can handle the overdetermined case currently being developed by my advisor and I. Called QUODcarb, it finds the most probable CO₂-system state given the measurements and their precisions by reformulating the seawater carbonate chemistry equations into a Bayesian inference problem. I expect this collaboration to be a pilot application of the new solver to assess data quality and internal consistency of the host’s dataset. In the following talk I will share how we hope Dalhousie’s oceangoing marine scientists can begin to collaborate with Irvine’s global ocean modelers.

Primary Presenter: Marina Fennell, University of California, Irvine (mfennell@uci.edu)

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