The Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) Observatory, located in Subantarctic waters near 141°E and 47°S, consists of autonomous moorings that provide high temporal resolution observations. It is focused on the Subantarctic Zone because waters formed at the surface in this region by deep wintertime convection slide under warmer subtropical and tropical waters, carrying CO2 and heat into the deep ocean, where it is out of contact with the atmosphere. This process also supplies oxygen for deep ocean ecosystems, and exports nutrients that fuel ~70% of global ocean primary production.
Local biological production also impacts carbon cycling and the SOTS moorings measure several variables important to these processes including solar radiation, chlorophyll fluorescence, optical backscatter, dissolved nitrate, dissolved oxygen, and total dissolved gases (using a total gas tension device). The oxygen and total gas tension observations can be combined to separate physical and biological contributions to surface mixed layer oxygen budgets and thus to yield estimates of net community production. This procedure, and the associated MATLAB code, are the subjects of this report. The code is currently enabled explicitly for the first three mooring deployments at SOTS with full suites of successful biogeochemical sensors required for the NCP calculations: Pulse-7, Pulse-9, and SOFS-7.5. It is constructed to allow expansion to future SOTS data sets, as well as other time series observations.
