Award Abstract #0504624
Ship Operations-R/V Roger Revelle

NSF Org:	OCE Division of Ocean Sciences
Initial Amendment Date:	June 7, 2005
Latest Amendment Date:	March 25, 2009
Award Number:	0504624
Award Instrument:	Cooperative Agreement
Program Manager:	Linda Goad OCE Division of Ocean Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences
Start Date:	March 1, 2005
Expires:	February 28, 2010 (Estimated)
Awarded Amount to Date:	$28106690
Investigator(s):	Bruce Appelgate bappelgate@ucsd.edu (Principal Investigator) Robert Knox (Former Principal Investigator) Thomas Althouse (Co-Principal Investigator)
Sponsor:	University of California-San Diego Scripps Inst of Oceanography 8602 La Jolla Shores Dr LA JOLLA, CA 92093 858/534-1293
NSF Program(s):	BE: CARBON & WATER IN ES, ERE General, OCEAN DRILLING PROGRAM, SHIP OPERATIONS, BE-MAT USE:SCIENCE,ENG&SOCIETY, BE: INSTRUM DEVELOP FOR ENV AC
Field Application(s):	0204000 Oceanography
Program Reference Code(s):	OTHR, 0000
Program Element Code(s):	H237, 7310, 7304, 5720, 5411, 1794, 1694

ABSTRACT

The Roger Revelle serves as a key support platform in the academic research fleet for a wide variety of scientific programs. The ship will spend 2005 in the Pacific, supporting ten very different scientific programs from the Antarctic south of New Zealand to the North Pacific east of Japan. The ship's schedule is 280 days for the year, with 232 in direct support of NSF funded research programs. The ship will operate under a five-year cooperative agreement. Funding for the years 2006-2009 will depend upon the number of days at sea in support of NSF-funded research programs.



Broader Impacts: The primary impact of ship operations is on the education of many students, principally but not exclusively graduate students in the ocean sciences. The great majority of scientific parties on Scripps (and other UNOLS) ships contain students in their ranks. They form integral parts of the research teams. By going to sea they obtain firsthand experience of the conduct of seagoing research, they learn the difficulties that surround the gathering of meaningful observations from the real ocean, and they gain valuable preparation for leading their own research projects at sea in their future careers.



A second important impact is on public appreciation of ocean science. Research ships are novel, attractive venues for tours by school groups and other interested citizens. To the maximum extent feasible within the context of necessary work and constraints of new port and vessel security requirements, Scripps tries to accommodate all such outreach instances in port, in San Diego and elsewhere, for we know that this gives positive representation to science in general and to seagoing ocean science in particular.



R/V Roger Revelle embarked Debra Brice, a NOAA-sponsored Teacher at Sea, in 2003; she made extensive use of satellite communications (HiSeasNet) on the vessel to interact with her middle-school science students ashore. She has recently been named one of four San Diego County Teachers of the Year (there are 25,000 county teachers) and will rejoin the ship in January (Sloyan/Swift cruise) for an expanded instructional program from sea (site in construction at http://footsteps.ucsd.edu), supported in part by the NSF Research Experiences for Teachers program. She will make significant use of new SIO-funded satellite videoconferencing equipment on the ship to interact with her students ashore.



Scripps also frequently receive inquiries from the public about volunteering to work at sea on a research vessel, often as a result of having browsed their marine http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/shipsked/) or general institutional (http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/) websites.They maintain information about volunteering on the site, pointing such inquirers toward scheduled chief scientists who may have need of volunteer assistance. There are university procedures in place to enroll volunteers on behalf of projects headed by UC-affiliated investigators, thereby providing appropriate insurance coverage, etc. In cases when volunteers and projects do connect successfully, strong educational experiences arise that can awaken a continuing interest in the oceans and ocean science.



Intellectual and Technical Merit: A vital key to the success of research expeditions is that the ship, her crew and her technical support staff must be - and are - capable and ready to change between radically dissimilar scientific programs during the brief in-port periods scheduled. Extensive loading, offloading, laboratory reconfiguration and setup, and installations of heavy, project-specific deck equipment and container vans are port call commonplaces, in 2005 as in other years.

The intellectual merit of the proposed work is indirect. It derives from the intellectual merit of the individual research projects that depend upon the shipboard work at sea. For example, in June-July two "mooring turnaround" cruises (Watts) will take place as part of the Kuroshio Extension System Study (KESS; http://www.po.gso.uri.edu/kess/). The goal of KESS is to identify and quantify the dynamic and thermodynamic processes governing the variability of and the interaction between the eastward extension of the Kuroshio (Pacific analogue of the Gulf Stream) and the adjacent gyre in which a portion of the flow recirculates. This region exhibits intense variability of the surface currents and temperatures, and thus of the exchanges of heat and moisture with the overlying atmosphere. Ocean dynamics here therefore have major implications for downstream climate and weather in North America. Revelle will renew the KESS instrumented moorings midway through this project plan. Her key capabilities are her extreme maneuverability, crew skills and the deck machinery needed for successful handling of deep-ocean moorings comprising heavy marine hardware and delicate sensors for current, temperature and other ocean parameters.

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