Ocean vital signs

Ocean vital signs seeks to answer a trillion+ dollar question: "Can new drone technologies and artificial intelligence help us learn about how the upper ocean carbon cycle works, improve air-sea CO2 flux estimates, and create a super-accurate monitoring network?" The project will deploy multiple groups of autonomous drones to gather new data for highly resolved process models. These models can be used to create neural networks that can fix gaps in current measurement systems and potentially produce maps of air-sea CO2 fluxes with much smaller uncertainties. Our project involves a team from across MIT and collaborators elsewhere. We hope to support more than 5000 drone days of observations in five missions over five years, sampling five ocean basins. We will aim to resolve an arguably multi-trillion-dollar uncertainty in the climate system and improve climate science knowledge of the ocean carbon cycle.