Autonomous ocean drones deployed from Hobart to track Southern Ocean carbon absorption

The first of a new fleet of uncrewed surface vehicles (USVs) departed from CSIRO Hobart this week to begin a five-year mission monitoring carbon dioxide absorption in the Southern Ocean. The autonomous craft, manufactured by Saildrone, will be deployed quarterly to circumnavigate Antarctica and collect data in remote marine environments.

Powered by wind and solar energy, the USVs operate as mobile research platforms designed to record real-time atmospheric and oceanographic data over several months at sea. According to project partners, the Southern Ocean accounts for roughly 40 percent of global ocean CO₂ uptake, though continuous data collection has historically been limited due to harsh weather conditions and low ship traffic.

The initiative is part of an international research collaboration involving Australia's national science agency CSIRO, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), South Africa's Southern Ocean Carbon-Climate Observatory (SOCCO) and CSIR, Columbia University, the University of Washington, Schmidt Sciences via the Virtual Institute for the Carbon Cycle program, and Saildrone.

Under the five-year project, a fleet of four Saildrone Explorers will operate simultaneously across different areas of the Southern Ocean. Each vessel is expected to travel approximately 22,000 kilometres per deployment before returning to Hobart for sensor maintenance and redeployment.

Dr Elizabeth Shadwick of CSIRO noted that the mission represents the first multi-year campaign using USVs specifically targeting data collection across seasons and regions where standard research and commercial vessels cannot easily operate.

Data collected will include atmospheric measurements such as wind speed, barometric pressure, relative humidity, air temperature, and atmospheric CO₂, alongside oceanographic readings of sea surface temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and seawater CO₂.

The findings are set to support the Constraining Ocean Carbon with Optimized Observing (COCO2) project and will feed into future editions of the annual Global Carbon Budget.

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