With the need to monitor and model human induced climate change, an important requirement is the collection of relevant, accurate, and timely data to inform oceanic changes.
While sea-surface data in various forms is generally available from satellite data and other sources such as the Argo system, obtaining measurements through the water column is more challenging and in areas such as the Antarctic sampling is generally very sparse and often collected in an unstructured or ad hoc way conditional on the location of appropriate research vessels and means of sampling at sea.
Fishing vessels, due to the nature of their operations are well-placed to collect simple measurements such as temperature through the water column as part of their general fishing operations. Many fishing methods involve fishing gear that passes up and down through the water column routinely in the activity of fishing.
This advantage was recognised in 2018 when the Moana Project, under the direction of MetOcean Solutions (the New Zealand Meteorological Service Oceanography Division) was funded over five years from the NZ Government Endeavour. This five-year partnership developed and implemented a low-cost ocean sensor to capture temperature and depth information which has now been widely deployed and is currently used throughout New Zealand’s EEZ supported by the commercial fishing sector to provide information through the water column. Currently, there are over 250 fishing vessels involved in the project within the New Zealand EEZ.
Using this work as a solid foundation, two New Zealand fishing industry vessels (owned and operated by Sanford Ltd) working in the CCAMLR-managed Ross Sea toothfish fishery trialled the use of this equipment in Antarctic waters. Here we briefly describe the system, present basic methods of operation and show some brief results obtained from this trial.