This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Andrew J. Lucas to work with Dr. Grant Pitcher at Marine and Coastal Management in South Africa, Dr. Frank Shillington at the University of Cape Town, Dr. Raphael Kudela at the University of California, Santa Cruz and with Dr. John Largier at the University of California, Davis.
Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) are a growing global problem, causing hundreds of millions of dollars of economic, environmental, and health losses each year. Autonomous, wave-powered profiling instruments (Wirewalkers, WW) are being used to study HAB dynamics from a Lagrangian (freely-drifting) and Eulerian (moored) perspective. These studies are being performed in the Benguela Current System (BCS) and California Current System (CCS) in collaboration with researchers from Marine and Coastal Management (a Department of Government of South Africa), the Department of Oceanography, University of Cape Town, South Africa, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the University of California, Davis. The autonomous wave-driven WW profilers are providing the first Lagrangian dataset of sufficient resolution to explicitly test hypotheses concerning advective versus in situ change in HAB populations. The results from this study are augmenting ongoing comparative studies of HAB dynamics in the southern Benguela and northern Monterey Bay upwelling systems. The interplay between the physical dynamics of upwelling systems and phytoplankton (HAB) bloom formation is not fully understood. This fact limits the ability to predict the onset and severity of individual HAB events as well as the influence of global climate change on HAB frequency, intensity, and geographic extent. The ongoing research is providing the first set of well-resolved, simultaneous measurements of physical and biological variables from the perspective of moored and Lagrangian measurements under conditions of active upwelling and during periods of relaxation.
This uniquely detailed dataset is advancing our understanding of the small-scale physical dynamics that control phytoplankton bloom initiation, maintenance, and transport of HABs to coastal waters. Our increased mechanistic understanding of these physical controls will permit an improved predictive capability of HAB events. Accurately forecasting HAB events from a combination of low-cost monitoring, satellite products, and numerical models can provide enormous societal benefit, particularly as HAB mitigation strategies evolve?potential saving significant sums of money and, most importantly, safeguarding human health in impacted coastal communities. Strong secular change in the CCS, driven by global climate variability, has modified the physical environment and led to increased occurrences of dinoflagellate HABs. Changes in hydrographic properties of the CCS show that it is becoming more like the BCS under forcing by global change. Thus comparative studies between the BCS and the CCS, such as the current project, are increasing our understanding of the potential for significant biological change in the CCS and BCS driven by global warming.
