Fairbanks Funds under the SGER program are provided to study the chemistry of the upper ocean in the tropical Pacific during the 1997 ENSO event. The funds will be used to complement a funded offshore coral drilling expedition on the R/V Moana Wave. Underway hydrographic data as well as more complete chemical and isotopic data from the upper ocean at profiles will be collected in the Nino 3 region on a cross-equatorial transect from Hawaii and Christmas island, at stations spacings of one degree latitude or less. The proposed nutrient, oxygen and fluorescence measurements that are proposed will form a base-line for comparison to prior and future studies of the changes in upper ocean geochemistry during El Nino and non-El Nino events. The oxygen isotope collection will improve our understanding of the convective system , its associated fresh water pathways and its impacts on the temperature and salinity stratification of the upper ocean. These processes are thought to be one of the sources of model failures in the some of the predictive ENSO models.
