Welcome aboard SOLACE

The Southern Ocean Large Areal Carbon Export (SOLACE) voyage has the following objectives.

1. Improve water column measurement of the downward export flux of carbon of the biological pump using an integrated suite of new technological advances – from particle decomposition to mesopelagic vertical migrations.
   
2. Integrate these improved estimates of the functioning of the biological export with bio-optical properties, used as proxies of biogeochemical (BGC) properties, and which can be remotely sensed using satellite sensors.  A combination of conventional passive “ocean colour radiometry” and active “CALIOP” LIDAR (that ‘sees through clouds’ and also senses below the surface) will be validated on SOLACE to provide a comprehensive regional extrapolation of carbon export fluxes.
   
3. Cross-link larger scale estimates of the biological pump (termed the BGP – biological gravitational pump – in a Review paper at Nature by Boyd, Claustre, Levy, Siegel and Weber, under revision) with those of PIPs (Particle Injection Pumps, Boyd et al., 2019, Nature) such as the Mixed Layer Pump (Llort et al., 2018) than can be assessed using profiling biological-floats (i.e., BGC-ARGO) as part of the US S. Ocean SOCCOM mission (www.soccom.edu), as well as the individual programmes of France, Australia and others.
   
4. To link these S. Ocean findings with those of international programmes on this topic, working on N. Hemisphere analogues, via data synthesis and modelling (co-collaborator Dave Siegel, UCSB) to produce large areal maps of carbon export by both the BGP and PIPs.  These programmes sit under the JETZON umbrella – http://jetzon.org/ .