11:45 AM - 12:00 PM
[ACG30-05] Biologging intelligent Platform (BiP) promotes Ocean-scape assessment using marine animals
Keywords:biologging, data assimilation
Satellite remote sensing systems are now providing information on physical ocean environments such as surface water temperature, surface currents, ocean wind and waves. ARGO profiling floats distributed in the whole ocean play a significant role to monitor 3D structure of temperature and salinity. Combining these data in a supercomputer allows numerical models nowcast/forecast atmosphere and ocean environments. Improvement in the accuracy of these models requires in situ measurements with higher spatial and temporal resolutions. However, sampling density of existing satellite remote sensing and meteorological buoys are still coarse spatially and temporally.
The “biologging” method was originally developed to solve ecological questions of marine animals. Besides many ecological papers, some unique papers demonstrated that bird-borne GPS can be a detailed, high-resolution and cost-efficient tool for observing ocean environment. During foraging trips some species of seabirds (shearwaters and albatrosses) spent half of their time resting on the water surface, tending to passively drift. Currents and waves deduced from their 3-D drift movements were in good agreement with ocean surface currents and waves derived from in situ and satellite data (Yoda et al., 2014 Progress in Oceanography, Uesaka et al. 2022 Progress in Oceanography). New analytical methods of GPS position of dynamic soaring seabirds have been established to estimate ocean wind speed and direction, and estimated values coincided with satellite-based wind data (Yonehara et al. 2016 PNAS, Goto et al. 2017 Science Advances). Satellite Relay Data Loggers (SRDL) were deployed on seals living in the Southern Ocean/Antarctic Circumpolar Current region where other in situ monitoring data were very few. The seal-tag temperature and salinity profiles data were used for ocean state estimation using data assimilation. The SRDL were deployed on loggerhead sea turtles migrating in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Confluence region, and turtle-tag temperature profiles data were assimilated into an operational ocean nowcast/forecast system JCOPE2M (Miyazawa et al. 2019 Ocean Dynamics). Comparison of the turtle measurements and products of the JCOPE2M elucidated low-temperature bias in JCOPE2M. Additional assimilation of the turtle data into a modified JCOPE2M system with correction of the low-temperature bias led to reasonable modification of horizontal temperature/salinity gradient in the region. Subsurface temperature measurements obtained from olive ridley sea turtles around the Arafura Sea were added into an operational seasonal prediction system (Doi et al. 2019 Frontiers in Marine Science). It was found that the prediction skill of regional sea surface temperatures around the Arafura Sea was significantly improved at 3-4 months of lead time
We believe marine animals can be living meteorological buoys for ocean-scape assessment, and the fine-scale data will be integrated into physical models through data assimilation to fill gaps in both time and space. To facilitate these new attempts, we have established a new system named “Biologging intelligent Platform (BiP)” (https://www.bip-earth.com). Biologging data obtained from marine animals are stored in the BiP. The available biologging data include position (GPS or ARGOS), depth, temperature, and behavior of animals. The system has a function to estimate wind, current and waves from GPS data recorded from seabirds. Everybody can view and download data from the system and use for their own aims. The BiP is still under construction, amount of data is increasing, and we are improving the function of the system. We hope to communicate with meteorologists and oceanographers who wish to use this system. Any requests and comments are welcome for us. We expect to contribute to improvements in the predictability and accuracy of numerical simulations for nowcast/forecast of the environmental boundary between atmosphere and ocean.
The “biologging” method was originally developed to solve ecological questions of marine animals. Besides many ecological papers, some unique papers demonstrated that bird-borne GPS can be a detailed, high-resolution and cost-efficient tool for observing ocean environment. During foraging trips some species of seabirds (shearwaters and albatrosses) spent half of their time resting on the water surface, tending to passively drift. Currents and waves deduced from their 3-D drift movements were in good agreement with ocean surface currents and waves derived from in situ and satellite data (Yoda et al., 2014 Progress in Oceanography, Uesaka et al. 2022 Progress in Oceanography). New analytical methods of GPS position of dynamic soaring seabirds have been established to estimate ocean wind speed and direction, and estimated values coincided with satellite-based wind data (Yonehara et al. 2016 PNAS, Goto et al. 2017 Science Advances). Satellite Relay Data Loggers (SRDL) were deployed on seals living in the Southern Ocean/Antarctic Circumpolar Current region where other in situ monitoring data were very few. The seal-tag temperature and salinity profiles data were used for ocean state estimation using data assimilation. The SRDL were deployed on loggerhead sea turtles migrating in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Confluence region, and turtle-tag temperature profiles data were assimilated into an operational ocean nowcast/forecast system JCOPE2M (Miyazawa et al. 2019 Ocean Dynamics). Comparison of the turtle measurements and products of the JCOPE2M elucidated low-temperature bias in JCOPE2M. Additional assimilation of the turtle data into a modified JCOPE2M system with correction of the low-temperature bias led to reasonable modification of horizontal temperature/salinity gradient in the region. Subsurface temperature measurements obtained from olive ridley sea turtles around the Arafura Sea were added into an operational seasonal prediction system (Doi et al. 2019 Frontiers in Marine Science). It was found that the prediction skill of regional sea surface temperatures around the Arafura Sea was significantly improved at 3-4 months of lead time
We believe marine animals can be living meteorological buoys for ocean-scape assessment, and the fine-scale data will be integrated into physical models through data assimilation to fill gaps in both time and space. To facilitate these new attempts, we have established a new system named “Biologging intelligent Platform (BiP)” (https://www.bip-earth.com). Biologging data obtained from marine animals are stored in the BiP. The available biologging data include position (GPS or ARGOS), depth, temperature, and behavior of animals. The system has a function to estimate wind, current and waves from GPS data recorded from seabirds. Everybody can view and download data from the system and use for their own aims. The BiP is still under construction, amount of data is increasing, and we are improving the function of the system. We hope to communicate with meteorologists and oceanographers who wish to use this system. Any requests and comments are welcome for us. We expect to contribute to improvements in the predictability and accuracy of numerical simulations for nowcast/forecast of the environmental boundary between atmosphere and ocean.