The European Ocean Carbon Summit is a campaign driven by a coalition of Horizon Europe projects focussed on ocean carbon to jointly summarise the aims and achievements of this EU investment portfolio and make recommendations for future funding actions; findings will be presented at an public event in Brussels.
Down Under in the Southern Ocean, the TRICUSO team has achieved another great success with the implementation of a surface pCO₂ sensor – an underway system on the MV Pharos, enabling crucial measurements of the surface ocean’s uptake of carbon.
The 2026 release of the Surface Ocean CO₂ Atlas (SOCAT) marks a landmark moment for ocean carbon science and for the TRICUSO project. With 44 million quality-controlled measurements now publicly available, SOCAT v2026 offers an unprecedented window into the health of the ocean carbon sink.
For the first time, a new approach to characterise surface ocean pCO₂ variability using observations from multiple Research Infrastructures, which disentangles the anthropogenic and circulation-driven contributions to observed pCO₂ changes, has been successfully validated at reference ocean time-series stations and extended to the Southern Ocean.
Partner NOC’s lab-on-chip technology miniaturises analytical laboratory methods into compact autonomous sensors. For this milestone, the focus has been on the TADIC sensor, which combines two carbonate-system measurements within a single autonomous lab-on-chip platform…
This has been a productive stretch for the project, and June looks set to be a highlight, with milestones arriving across sensor integration on autonomous platforms, observing system design, engagement with the racing yacht industry, and the first steps toward building an international governance structure for surface ocean CO₂ observations. Each of these reflects a different layer of what TRICUSO is trying to achieve, and it is encouraging to see so many of them coming together at once.
TRICUSO’s first video showcases the beautiful scenery of the Antarctic region and focuses on early project stories. It features interviews with consortium scientists discussing the need to expand the capacity for observation in the Southern Ocean where an increase in data is needed to help address the discrepancy between data and models used for forecasting. The video also introduces the project’s ambitions to innovate sensor technology and engage the support of citizen science platforms—racing yachts and tourist vessels—sailing in the Southern Ocean.
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This work was funded by the European Union under grant agreement no. 101188028. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency (REA). Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
