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Workshop QA for Inorganic Carbon measurements, 18-20 March 2025
The NOC has hosted last week the Workshop on Quality Assurance for Inorganic Carbon Measurements - Ocean Acidification & Marine CO2 Removal Technologies - 18-20 March 2025. Local host Sue Hartman (NOC) and Jon Blower welcomed about 60 participants from across the world to this in-person workshop. It is 9-years since NOC last hosted this workshop and the participant numbers have doubled in this important area of monitoring climate change, mitigation and ocean acidification.
The workshop was organised by the National Oceanography Centre (NOC, UK), Plymouth Marine Laboratory (PML, UK), the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS, BE) and Wepal-Quasimeme (part of Wageningen University & Research, NL). It was partially sponsored by Wepal-Quasimeme (https://www.wepalquasimeme.nl/) and MINKE Minke – Metrology for Integrated marine maNagement and Knowledge-transfer nEtwork.
The Workshop was very successful, with a total of 18 presentations and 13 posters. Main topics of discussion were: 1) Interlaboratory Comparison studies (Wepal-Quasimeme AQ15 proficiency test and the 2017 ILC from Scripps/Andrew Dickson), 2) the use and needs of Reference Materials for calibration and quality control, 3) the needs to measure Total Alkalinity (TA), Dissolved Inorganic Carbon (DIC), pH, pCO2 and the challenges faced to determine uncertainties, and 4) new methods, techniques & sensors.
Representatives from metrology laboratories, academia and industry (including Skalar and 4H-Jena) presented techniques to ensure high quality carbonate measurements, important in the context of climate change mitigation and monitoring of ocean acidification. Invited speaker Andrew Dickson shared his knowledge of intercalibration and method standardisation, and there were some lively discussion sessions in the workshop, on the NOC laboratory tours and around the posters.