SAVEX South Atlantic Variability Experiment

南大洋（SO）似乎是地球上一个偏远的地方，对大多数人的日常生活来说并不重要。但随着对它的海洋学和生物学知识的增加，科学家们很快意识到它可以说是地球上最重要的海洋。它是唯一一个完全环绕地球仪的水体，为世界上所有海洋提供了至关重要的联系。南大洋的物理过程关闭了全球温盐环流，并将从北极到南极的气候过程联系起来，从而对所有其他海洋产生重大影响。它的物理结构和动态支持极其丰富和重要的生物资源，包括从初级生产者到顶级捕食者的所有营养级的关键物种。这种独特的连通性和生物学也为广泛的海洋活动带来了战略重要性，包括商业开发，运输和保护，这些活动共同带来了相互竞争的利益之间的冲突。然而，由于SO对直接观测的成本和后勤挑战，它也可以说是研究最少的海洋，特别是在冬季及其南部和季节性冰雪覆盖地区，这在物理海洋学和生态系统方面都具有深远的重要性。随着公众日益关注人类活动对气候的影响以及海洋生态系统开发迅速增加的后果，监测和了解海洋的物理动态并将其与依赖这些动态的生物过程联系起来的必要性变得至关重要，同样重要的是，需要适当的精细海洋数据，以建立日益复杂的模型，为了解气候提供基础。最近的一项研究认为，观测到的SO变暖是人为的，与纬向风增加引起的南极绕极流（ACC）南移有关。然而，这是基于粗分辨率建模，虽然有一些支持这一想法的基础上，卫星研究，重要的是要注意，卫星只真正有效地跟踪特定的前，而不是整个ACC.Many问题，因此仍然没有得到解决，特别是：ACC的位置是否改变系统的方式来响应风的变化？我们试图解决这个问题，通过装备战略选择，深潜海洋哺乳动物物种与国家的最先进的动物携带的海洋仪器。全球海洋观测系统等方案将能够将这些数据同化到海洋环流模型中，以便准确地表示和预测季节性和较长时间尺度的气候变化。该项目将在国际极地年期间对极地海洋研究特别有利的时候作出贡献。在此期间，全球将共同努力，在极地海洋迅速变化的时期，以及人们越来越认识到它们对全球气候的重要性时，观察和解释高纬度海洋学的各个方面。IPY将让我们的极地动物本身作为观察和探索团队的重要组成部分，帮助我们获得对它们和我们都重要的地方的数据。这些仪器收集和储存行为和水文数据，并通过Argos系统将其传回海洋哺乳动物研究股的服务器。这将提供一个大的高分辨率水文数据集，涵盖南大西洋边缘的海洋区域，这对海洋和气候建模具有战略重要性，但由于后勤困难，这些区域的数据仍然相对稀少。

The Southern Ocean (SO) may seem like a remote part of the planet that has little importance to the every day lives of most people. But with increasing knowledge about its oceanography and biology, scientists are rapidly coming to realize that it is arguably the Earth's most important ocean. It is the only water body that completely circles the globe, providing the crucial link between all of the worlds' oceans. Physical processes in the SO influence all other oceans in significant ways, by closing the global thermohaline circulation and linking climatic processes from the Artic to the Antarctic. Its physical structure and dynamics support extremely rich and important biological resources including key species across all trophic levels from primary producers to top predators. This unique connectivity and biology also brings strategic importance for a wide range of oceanic activities, including commercial exploitation, transport, and conservation, which together bring the potential of conflicts between competing interests. Yet because of the cost and logistic challenges the SO presents to direct observation, it is the also arguably the least studied ocean, especially during winter and in its southern and seasonally ice covered regions, which are of profound importance both in terms of their physical oceanography and ecosystems. With growing public concern about the effects of human activities on climate and the consequences of rapidly increasing marine exploitation for oceanic ecosystems, the need for monitoring and understanding its physical dynamics and linking these to the biological processes that depend on them is becoming critical, as is the need for appropriate fine-scale ocean data for increasingly sophisticated models to provide the basis for understanding climate. A recent study argued that an observed warming of the SO is man-made and related to a southward shift of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) caused by an increase in zonal winds. However, this is based on coarse-resolution modeling, and whilst there has been some support for this idea based on satellite studies, it is important to note that satellites are only really effective at tracking particular fronts, not the whole ACC. Many issues consequently remain unresolved, particularly: Does the position of the ACC change in a systematic way in response to changes in winds? We try to address this question, by equipping strategically chosen, deep-diving marine mammal species with state-of-the-art animal-borne oceanographic instruments. Programmes such as the Global Ocean Observation System will enable the assimilation of such data into ocean circulation models, with the intention of accurately representing and predicting climate variability on seasonal and longer timescales. This project will make its contributions at a particularly advantageous time for polar ocean studies, during the International Polar Year (IPY). During this time, a global concerted effort will be made to observe and interpret all aspects of high-latitude oceanography during this time of rapid change in the polar seas and when there is a growing realization of the importance they have for global climate Thanks to our technological developments in data collection, storage and communication, IPY will have our polar animals themselves as an important part of the observational and exploratory team to help us get data on places important to both them and us. The instruments collect and store behavioural and hydrographic data and relay them via the Argos System back to servers at the Sea Mammal Research Unit. This will provide a large high-resolution hydrographic data set covering areas of ocean at the fringes of the South Atlantic which is strategically important to ocean and climate modelling, but which are still relatively data sparse due to logistic difficulties.