Partners

The expertise, and what only they can supply

The numbers we need are not in papers. They sit in programme offices, cruise budgets and project accounts, and each group holds a different part of them. The papers are the reason to put them in one place.

Observing networks · paper 1

GO-SHIP, SOCAT and IOCCP, Argo and BGC-Argo, OceanOPS, GOOS. They hold the budgets: cost per repeat line, per float-year and per underway system, and the platform totals.

NOAA platforms · papers 1, 3

NOAA PMEL and NOAA AOML run the moored CO2 network and the uncrewed surface vehicle missions. They hold cost per observation-day and the data-service contract rates.

Budget synthesis · papers 1, 2

The Global Carbon Project and the product and model groups behind it. They hold the uncertainty budget by component and can test its sensitivity to lost data.

mCDR verification · papers 2, 3

Columbia (McKinley group), [C]Worthy, Exeter, WHOI field trials, and registries and developers with verified credits (Isometric, Planetary). They hold detection thresholds and per-tonne MRV cost.

Economics, policy · papers 2, 3

WHOI Marine Policy Center, Resources for the Future, MIT, and a London Protocol and permitting contact (to identify). They hold the cost-benefit framework, what developers pay for MRV today, and the monitoring rules an experiment must meet.

Their value

Access. These numbers are not in the literature. The group's role is access, not authorship; the papers are written with the people who hold the numbers.

Who uses the results. Observing programmes and their funders when they argue for sustaining the networks; the Global Carbon Budget community when it reports the sink; registries, developers and buyers when they price verification; and the planning bodies: WMO Global Greenhouse Gas Watch, NASEM, national ocean observing plans. Together the three papers add up to a shared vision of an ocean carbon MRV system: what to measure, how accurately, and at what cost.

Take part

What we are asking of partners

The papers go ahead when at least two of these three can be obtained. If you hold one of them, or can introduce us to the person who does, that is the conversation we want to have.

For paper 1

A programme budget

Cost per repeat hydrographic line, per ship day, per underway pCO2 system per year, per float-year, per mooring per year, or the person-months behind a synthesis release. Partial figures with stated assumptions are useful.

For paper 2

A detection-threshold analysis

For at least one mCDR pathway: the observing density and accuracy needed to see a project's signal against the background ocean, and which added observations reduce local error most.

For paper 3

A per-tonne MRV cost

What a project or registry pays for monitoring, reporting and verification, per project and per tonne, and how buyers discount uncertain credits. Figures can be shared in confidence and reported in aggregate.

Contact: Emanuele Di Lorenzo, Brown University ·