The TO-GRO™ program gets more up-and-coming oceanographers out to sea conducting research.

This program allows graduate and recent graduate students to conduct ocean research. At the same time, we transit, which helps us all better understand and monitor the evolving biological and geochemical conditions of the Ocean.

Graduate oceanographers are limited in their chances to go to sea to advance research.

Big ship time is costly, has a high environmental impact, and it is competitive to be granted an opportunity to sail.

The TO-GRO program gets more up-and-coming oceanographers out to sea. With ORP, they can use their education, and gain sail-going and expedition-leadership experience while improving their ability to take complex optical measurements.

Continuous optical measurements and lab access to manage data and samples will support the TO-GRO participants for each transit cruise leg. Onboard RV Marie Tharp, they can test optical technology, and advance their research while jointly expanding the observations needed for the satellite remote sensing research community to interpret better satellite observations of the changes to the Ocean ecosystem. Data is submitted to NASA for public access and contributes to the students’ conference presentations and journal publications.

USA to Greenland and the Inaugural TO-GO Project

The crew leaves Maryland for Greenland with two young women oceanographers launching ORP’s underway – TO-GRO program. They will test and collect continuous water quality observations along the east coast along the Gulf Stream.

Your sponsorship will allow for collecting the first ocean measurements of RV Marie Tharp’s maiden voyage while the crew adjusts to life on Marie at sea and heads towards the iceberg-packed waters. This dataset will be used in comparison with NASA satellite ocean color models of surface biology from warm to cold water and is a major contribution to better-interpreting satellite monitoring of coastal biodiversity between a mid-latitude to high latitude climate.

To coordinate your support for this effort, please get in touch with Us directly.

RESEARCHER SPOTLIGHT

Hello! I am Camila, a postdoc at MIT working with global ocean ecosystem models. I was born in Brazil, but grew up in Spain and did a PhD in oceanography in Denmark. I am keen to understand how living organisms drive the earth’s climate. That’s why I centered on studying plankton, as they are the base of the marine food-web and play an important role in global biogeochemical cycle. Even though a great deal of new technologies has emerged to monitor the oceans, I think we are not yet fully exploiting the potential of this data. That is why my ambition is to use mechanistic models to better understand what this field data is telling us in terms of ecosystem processes. I am particularly interested in optical data, as it can be collected from floats and satellites. The latter being the only way of assessing the oceans at the global scale. That is why I am currently investigating the relation between backscattering and chlorophyll, which can provide estimates of phytoplankton biomass and other carbon stocks.

Unfortunately, as a mathematical modeler, I did not have many opportunities to go on research cruises.

This research expedition is an amazing opportunity for me to collect more data for my project and gain experience in the field. I hope that this opportunity gives me enough knowledge to apply for future funding where I can collect my own data and develop projects that gets us closer to monitoring the changing earth system.

RV Marie Tharp in Greenland