By Gerrie Grevatt / South Shore Bureau
White Point – Predicting climate change depends on understanding ocean behaviour as a major climate regulator, scientists say.
Researchers from the world’s top oceanographic institutions gathered in White Point this week to talk about oceans and climate and the inroads scientists have made in monitoring oceans internationally.
The oceanographers are members of the Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans, formed three years ago to promote long-term collaboration in ocean surveillance. The group’s headquarters is at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth.
About 40 delegates from 19 institutions in Canada, the United States, Chile, France, Japan, India, Holland and Brazil took part in the three-day session.
“There’s no country in the world that’s unaffected by climate change. It’s the most enveloping environmental problem that we have,” said Charles Kennel, meeting chairman and a director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
“Everyone is affected by it so there’s a motivation for everybody, particularly the advanced nations, to contribute to the scientific solutions.”
This year, the ocean-watch partnership launched a series of robotic floats, about the size of torpedoes, that drift below the surface to measure temperature and salinity. The floats surface every two weeks to communicate information to a satellite. The data is collected at centres in California and France.
There are about 300 floats in the North Atlantic and the north and central Pacific.
“We want 3,000 of these little probes wandering about the world’s oceans telling us what’s happening . . . wandering with the currents, keeping watch on the behaviour of the ocean,” Mr. Kennel said.
It is the ocean in concert with greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that determine how the climate is going to evolve, Mr. Kennel said.
“It’s the only way we have of gauging what kind of decisions we’re going to face in the future. . . . Our guesses for what will happen will become more accurate if we can make the observations of the ocean more complete and more accurate.”
