RRS Discovery Cruise DY050, 18 Apr - 08 May 2016. Cruise to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain sustained observatory.

The Porcupine Abyssal Plain Observatory is a sustained, multidisciplinary observatory in the North Atlantic coordinated by the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton. For over 20 years the observatory has provided key time-series datasets for analysing the effect of climate change on the open ocean and deep-sea ecosystems. More information on PAP can be found in NOC’s website at: http://projects.noc.ac.uk/pap/ where the most current data can be found: http://projects.noc.ac.uk/pap/pap-april-2017 PAP is one of the 23 fixed-point open ocean observatories included in the Europe-funded project FixO3, coordinated by Professor Richard Lampitt at NOC: http://www.fixo3.eu/ This 4-year project started in September 2013 with the aim to integrate the open ocean observatories operated by European organizations and is a collaboration of 29 partners from 10 different countries.