I’m working with an instrument that can record ocean pH at set intervals. When deployed, you get a graph of pH over time, which my lab uses to construct biological experiments in the lab. I’m currently at a week-long workshop with Professor Todd Martz at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, who first developed the instrument several years ago. The instrument has been gaining traction as a means to understand ocean acidification and global ocean change, and I hope this workshop will allow me to better collect and use the data!

Day 1: I’ve been learning how to use the commercialized Satlantic SeaFET ocean pH sensor – specifically the nuances of deployment, as we dropped the instruments in a lab tank today! We will be downloading the data every day this week to get an idea of how to handle the pH timeseries data that comes off of the sensors.

Also on the schedule tomorrow is a primer on seawater chemistry by Professor Andrew Dickson (the man himself!), as well as talks and hands-on demonstrations of sensor calibration and bottle sample analysis. Essentially, this will let us ground-truth our sensor measurements with samples of seawater collected at the same time the sensor is recording.

They put us in dorms!

Typical La Jolla sunset.

Professor Grace Saba from Rutgers, prepping our SeaFET for tank deployment!