The project will support a science workshop at the University of Hawaii in 2013 that will bring together members of the analytical chemistry community and chemical oceanography community. The goal of the workshop is to foster collaboration between these two disciplines and thereby advance the application of novel analytical chemistry techniques to the field of chemical oceanography. The proponents are leaders in their respective fields and have identified an important and growing gap in the field of chemical oceanography; namely, the need to develop the next generation of chemical oceanographers that are skilled in the trace analytical chemistry of seawater. The proposed workshop will bring together a broad range of expertise in the application of analytical chemistry to marine environmental problems, which has important broader implications in regards to developing future marine chemical sensors and observing systems.
Chemical oceanographers, by making measurements of various chemical elements in ocean water, seek to discover, understand, and quantify ocean processes and use them in conjunction with other branches of oceanography to understand how the oceans interact with Earth system processes. We use this information to understand how the planetary biogeochemical systems affect and interact with the climate and use the chemical record in the sediments to understand how these systems operated in the past. With this knowledge we can build accurate models to predict responses to future climate forcing events. The primary inputs to chemical oceanography are dominantly provided by applied analytical chemistry. However, many of the chemical methods that we use to make these measurements are incompatible with the new remotely operated platforms that have been recently developed because for example they use too much electrical energy or require too much maintenance to be left working in an unattended mode. The Collaborative on Oceanographic Chemical Analysis was a workshop held at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, HI during March, 2013 that was aimed at bringing together members of the analytical chemistry and the oceanography community. The workshop consisted of 1.5 days of invited talks of individuals from both of the fields and 2 days of working groups that produced a report suggesting new areas of research to develop low power consumption methodology. The benefit of developing these ties between these two groups of scientists is that it will develop a group of individuals who know each other and can then start to develop collaborations that will bring new ideas for methodology development into the field of oceanography. At the same time this collaboration alerts the analytical community to the issues that are faced in making environmental measurements, e.g. very low concentrations, contamination from construction materials and the high ionic strength of seawater which challenges existing methodology in analytical chemistry and hopefully spurs new research directions in that field. One outcome from this workshop has been a proposal to form an international working group that can continue the initial ideas and provide a forum for analytical development in environmental sciences.
