POLARSTERN PS147/2

Expedition PS147 is the last leg of the 2024/25 Antarctic research season and will bring back the ship to its home port of Bremerhaven. Expedition PS147 starts in Stanley on 13.03.2025 and ends in Bremerhaven on 14.04.2025. On 01.04.2025 there will be a stopover in Mindelo, which will divide the voyage into legs PS147/1 and PS147/2. From Mindelo, the focus is on an academic training cruise (“Floating University”) for West African M.Sc. students, during which daily station work will be carried out. The training on this leg takes place as part of the WASCAL Programme (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land-Use) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Throughout the voyage (leg 1 and 2), the en route measurements and activities will
be carried out. With the ship-mounted hydroacoustic systems, a swath of seabed topography will be bathymetrically surveyed along the ship’s track. A few hours of station time will be spent on calibrating the echosounding systems by sound velocity profiler and CTD casts. The PAMOS prototype is used to continuously take air samples in order to determine the distribution of aerosols and trace gases, in particular black carbon, in different climate zones. Biogeochemical measurements in the surface ocean using flow-through sensors (e.g., CO2 partial pressure and dissolved oxygen). Daily station work will begin from Mindelo onwards with the on-board CTD rosette water sampler and a multinet. The two time series stations CVOO north of Cabo Verde (“Cabo Verde Ocean Observatory”) and ESTOC north of Gran Canaria (“European Station of Time-Series in the Ocean of the Canary Islands”) will also be sampled to continue long-term data collection. In addition, several deployments of Argo Floats will take place as part of the international Argo programme.