The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is a long-term NSF-funded program that deploys autonomous sensors on both moored and mobile platforms at multiple locations, including the Global Irminger Sea Array (60.46°N, 38.44°W) (Trowbridge et al., 2019). The OOI program conducts yearly turn-around cruises to the Irminger Sea Array to recover and redeploy moorings and gliders deployed year-round at this site. During these cruises the OOI program routinely conducts Conductivity Temperature Depth (CTD) casts and collects water samples from Niskin bottles on the CTD rosette for discrete sample analysis. These turn-around cruise data are critical for validation and calibration of the data from sensors deployed year-round and also provide a valuable dataset in and of themselves (Palevsky et al., 2023).
For this project, our team participated in the 2024 and 2025 turn-around cruises to the OOI Irminger Sea Array (AR84-01, RV Neil Armstrong and RR2505, R/V Roger Revelle). We collected supplementary additional samples for DIC and TA from CTD casts to further support efforts to improve the capacity to produce high-quality data products from OOI’s biogeochemical sensors to enable analysis of scientific questions about the ocean’s biological carbon pump and other carbon cycling processes (Yoder et al., 2024; Palevsky et al., 2023). Sampling was targeted to add full-depth profiles and increase depth resolution beyond the validation samples routinely collected by the OOI program.
Samples were collected for dissolved inorganic carbon (DIC) and total alkalinity (TA) analysis following standard protocols (Dickson et al., 2007). Samples were collected into 250 mL borosilicate glass bottles and preserved with saturated mercuric chloride (100 μL) for later analysis. For further sample and data processing details, please see the Data Processing section of this metadata landing page.
These supplemental data provided here were collected in coordination with data collected by the OOI program. The complete collection of shipboard data and cruise documentation from these cruises is available on the OOI managed document storage, the OOI Raw Data Repository (https://rawdata.oceanobservatories.org/files/cruise_data/Irminger_Sea/). The discrete water sampling data collected by the OOI program at the Irminger Sea Array is also available from BCO-DMO (see Related Datasets). For more information on recommendations for use of cruise data to calibrate OOI biogeochemical sensors, see the OOI Biogeochemical Sensor Data Best Practices and User Guide (Palevsky et al., 2023).
Full cruise data from the OOI Irminger Sea cruises for which discrete sample data are presented here can be accessed via the Rolling Deck to Repository (R2R).
