RSMAS Part of $21 Million Research Program

MIAMI - Researchers for the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science are part of a $21 million collaborative research program led by Princeton University to create a biogeochemical and physical portrait of the Southern Ocean using hundreds of robotic floats deployed around Antarctica and an expanded computational capacity. The Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling program, or SOCCOM, is a six-year initiative headquartered at Princeton and funded by the National Science Foundation's Division of Polar Programs, with additional support from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA. UM Rosenstiel School Associate Professor of Ocean Sciences Igor Kamenkovich, is a co-investigator who will lead the design and analysis of SOCCOM's Observation System Simulation Experiments (OSSE), and will be involved into the studies of the importance of eddies in heat-carbon distributions, model analysis and metric development. "SOCCOM will enable top scientists from institutions around the country to work together on Southern Ocean research in ways that would not otherwise be possible," said SOCCOM director Jorge Sarmiento, Princeton's George J. Magee Professor of Geoscience and Geological Engineering and director of the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. "This project represents a true synthesis of observational and modeling studies," said Kamenkovic.