Table of Contents

• Coverage
• Dataset Description
  • Methods & Sampling
  • Data Processing Description
• Data Files
• Related Publications
• Parameters
• Instruments
• Deployments
• Project Information
• Funding

Falkor ProteOMZ nitrous oxide from expedition (FK160115) in the Central Pacific in 2016.

Samples were collected from the CTD rosette into 160 mL glass serum bottles.

Nitrous oxide concentration: N2O concentrations were measured using a headspace equilibration method and analyzed on a SRI Greenhouse Gas Monitoring Gas Chromatograph (GC) equipped with an electron capture detector (ECD), dual HayeSep D packed columns, and a 1-mL sample loop (SRI Instruments, Torrance, California, USA; Elkins 1980; Laperriere et al. 2019). N2O concentrations were calculated according to Walter et al. (2006). 

BCO-DMO Processing Notes:
 - added conventional header with dataset name, PI name, version date
 - modified parameter names to conform with BCO-DMO naming conventions
 - combined date and time columns to form ISO Date format in column ISO_DateTime_UTC

From Schmidt Ocean Institute's ProteOMZ Project page:

Rising temperatures, ocean acidification, and overfishing have now gained widespread notoriety as human-caused phenomena that are changing our seas. In recent years, scientists have increasingly recognized that there is yet another ingredient in that deleterious mix: a process called deoxygenation that results in less oxygen available in our seas.

Large-scale ocean circulation naturally results in low-oxygen areas of the ocean called oxygen deficient zones (ODZs). The cycling of carbon and nutrients – the foundation of marine life, called biogeochemistry – is fundamentally different in ODZs than in oxygen-rich areas. Because researchers think deoxygenation will greatly expand the total area of ODZs over the next 100 years, studying how these areas function now is important in predicting and understanding the oceans of the future. This first expedition of 2016 led by Dr. Mak Saito from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) along with scientists from University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, University of California Santa Cruz, and University of Washington aimed to do just that, investigate ODZs.

During the 28 day voyage named “ProteOMZ,” researchers aboard R/V Falkor traveled from Honolulu, Hawaii to Tahiti to describe the biogeochemical processes that occur within this particular swath of the ocean’s ODZs. By doing so, they contributed to our greater understanding of ODZs, gathered a database of baseline measurements to which future measurements can be compared, and established a new methodology that could be used in future research on these expanding ODZs.