Sea Change: Charting the Course for Biogeochemical Ocean Time-Series Research in a New Millennium

Ocean time-series provide vital information needed for assessing ecosystem change. This paper summarizes the historical context, major program objectives, and future research priorities for three contemporary ocean time-series programs: The Hawaii Ocean Time-series (HOT), the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study (BATS), and the CARIACO Ocean Time-Series. These three programs operate in physically and biogeochemically distinct regions of the world’s oceans, with HOT and BATS located in the open-ocean waters of the subtropical North Pacific and North Atlantic, respectively, and CARIACO situated in the anoxic Cariaco Basin of the tropical Atlantic. All three programs sustain near-monthly shipboard occupations of their field sampling sites, with HOT and BATS beginning in 1988, and CARIACO initiated in 1996. The resulting data provide some of the only multi-disciplinary, decadalscale determinations of time-varying ecosystem change in the global ocean. Facilitated by a scoping workshop (September 2010) sponsored by the Ocean Carbon Biogeochemistry (OCB) program, leaders of these time-series programs sought community input on existing program strengths and for future research directions. Themes that emerged from these discussions included:

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