As oceanographers have added floating robots to our work from ships, we have discovered that global warming is really ocean warming. It is a triumph of earth system science that the mystery of the deep blue sea’s role in climate and weather is now measured and used to inform our everyday forecasts and our far distant projections. New robots, new sensors and new computer models are transforming how we measure and forecast the vast and accelerating changes in our earth’s climate. The next generation of biogeochemical floats that measure carbon, nutrients and chlorophyll will do for carbon what the first floating robots did for heat, allowing us to verify our new international carbon agreements for the top ten global economies.
Lecturer: Joellen Russell Associate Professor, Geosciences, University of Arizona