Title: An overview of SOCCOM (Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling): ten years of studying circulation, heat, and carbon in the Southern Ocean
Abstract: The SOCCOM (Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling) program, which started in 2014, seeks to improve global climate understanding and prediction through improved observation and modeling of Southern Ocean processes south of about 30°S. This region is known to be fundamental to climate but had been absurdly undersampled, especially in winter. SOCCOM has proceeded on three disciplinary fronts: physics (heat, freshwater and buoyancy; transport processes), biogeochemistry (principally carbon and oxygen), and biology (productivity). SOCCOM has: (1) built a circumpolar array of profiling biogeochemical (BGC) Argo floats (> 24,000 profiles so far), (2) incorporated SOCCOM BGC float data as constraints in the 4DVar BGC Southern Ocean State Estimate (B-SOSE), (3) contributed approximately 200 peer-reviewed publications that advance understanding of the Southern Ocean’s role in climate. In this talk I’ll review SOCCOM work connecting the Southern Ocean’s horizontal and overturning circulations to carbon processes, and to changes in upper ocean temperature and sea ice.