Plan To Straight-Up Destroy Ocean Data Network Shelved, But Funding Cuts Likely To Severely Degrade Data Quality

In the United States and elsewhere, ocean research infrastructure is facing a funding crisis. The U.S. National Science Foundation recently proposed dismantling hundreds of deep-ocean observation instruments, though it reversed the decision after public outcry. Still, a lagging NOAA budget and cuts to federal research funding have slowed the deployment of U.S.-owned instruments that measure ocean metrics and left the future of Argo, a global fleet of robotic instruments drifting in the ocean, in question. In addition, the number of observational floats deployed by Europe, as well as the number of active European floats, has dropped steadily since about 2020.

A study published in Nature Climate Change quantifies the impact that changes in funding could have on ocean data. Through a series of experiments, the research team showed that even small changes to the availability of data within the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), a United Nations–supported network of ocean observations, would significantly decrease the quality of ocean heat information available to researchers, making global climate and weather predictions more difficult.

Without U.S. contributions to the network, for example, “we lose the capability to monitor ocean warming,” said Lijing Cheng, an oceanographer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and coauthor of the new study. Cheng is a member of the World Meteorological Organization’s Ocean Observations Physics and Climate Panel, which evaluates the status of global ocean observation systems and recommends strategies to keep such systems sustainable. “It’s a really important paper because it is addressing the precarity of our current global ocean observing system,” said Hilary Palevsky, a marine biogeochemist at Boston College who was not involved in the study.

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According to Cheng, much of the information gathered about the health of ocean observation systems like GOOS is simply inventories—counts of how many observations exist. Rarely does anyone evaluate how the number of observations available affects the quality of the data, he said. And with various global threats to data stewardship and funding, making that assessment could be more important than ever. To see how a hypothetical loss of GOOS observations could affect ocean heat content data, Cheng and the research team ran two experiments. First, they randomly removed 20%, 40%, 60%, and 80% of the available GOOS ocean heat content observations to mimic possible changes to the system. Losing these data degraded measurements of the global annual ocean heating rate in all cases, increasing the relative error of the measurement by about 33%, 57%, 79%, and 97%, respectively.

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https://eos.org/articles/changes-in-funding-could-tank-quality-of-ocean-heat-content-data