On January 22nd, 2021, 1-2 PM UTC, Susana Barbosa, senior researcher at INESC TEC (Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science, Portugal), presented the SAIL campaign – new observations for the study of space-atmosphere-ocean interactions. Tania Li Chen (AIR Centre) was the moderator.

The SAIL (Space-Atmosphere-Ocean Interactions in the marine boundary Layer ) project, aiming to measure the electric atmospheric field and evaluate the health of the ocean, was aboard the Sagres’ circumnavigation voyage, a 371-day around the world tour, which began on January 5th, 2020, but was cut short due to the pandemics after stopovers in Tenerife, Spain (January 2020); Praia, Cape Verde (January 2020 ); Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (February 2020); Montevideo, Uruguay (February 2020); Buenos Aires, Argentina (March 2020) and Cape Town, South Africa (March 2020).

The importance of this project relies on the lack of proper knowledge about low clouds and the processes and interactions in which they are involved, including storms and electrical discharges. With a multidisciplinary team formed by experts in robotics, marine biology, geophysical monitoring, data management and oceanic engineering, SAIL established a unique monitoring campaign, enabling access to data concerning various parameters of the ocean and atmosphere, in particular the electric atmospheric field, which was first measured by the Carnegie research ship, a hundred years ago, with a relevance so grand that the “Carnegie curve” is still used today as a reference for atmospheric electricity measurements.

Speaker

Susana Barbosa

Susana Barbosa is a senior researcher at INESC TEC (Porto, Portugal) working as a data scientist at the interface of data science, earth observation, and robotics. She has a degree in Physics/Applied Mathematics (branch of Astronomy), a master degree in Computational methods, and a PhD in Surveying Engineering (on sea level change) from the University of Porto. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, with a strong emphasis on the analysis of time series in the scope of climate and earth system science. Her current research interests focus on novel environmental monitoring for the study of space-atmosphere-ocean interactions.

We will continue with the Networking Fridays during the next months. More information about future sessions as well as presentations and videos from previous sessions can be found here. Twitter Hashtag: #netfridays. Expect some very exciting afternoons, or mornings or evenings, depending on where you are…

If you need any additional information please send an email to Jose Luiz Moutinho.