CAVASSOO
Overview
CAVASSOO is an EC funded project (2001-2003) involving 5 institutions. The CAVASSOO project was initiated at the CARINA workshop (9-11 June 1999, Germany) which was convened to bring together research groups measuring CO2 in the North Atlantic Ocean.
Summary objective
CAVASSOO will provide reliable estimates of the uptake of CO2 by the North Atlantic, and how this varies from season to season and year to year. These will in turn assist in constraining estimates of European and North American terrestrial (vegetation) sinks, using atmospheric inverse modelling techniques.
To obtain whole-basin estimates we are setting up 4 routes (shown below) on which automated surface pCO2 and related measurements will be made using ships of opportunity.
Figure 1: Solid lines: Proposed new pCO2 ship of opportunity routes in CAVASSOO Dashed lines: Routes proposed by US colleagues
To interpolate between these cruises we will use existing CO2 data which will also be included in our database.
The summary objective is broken into subsidiary objectives.
Links with other projects
Three time series stations implemented under the EC project ANIMATE lie close to the CAVASSOO cruises. Each mooring will carry a near-surface CO2 sensor.
