Chinese research vessel completes 35-day Western Pacific mission

The findings hold significant scientific value for deepening the understanding of air-sea interactions and refining typhoon forecast models, while providing tangible socio-economic benefits for improving maritime safety and navigational forecasting.

With scientists predicting the Pacific could see its strongest El Nino in nearly a century this year, the expedition also conducted targeted multidisciplinary observations to study the phenomenon, a periodic warming of equatorial Pacific waters that can disrupt weather patterns worldwide. The team collected more than 900 liters of subsurface seawater and over 8,000 liters of surface water, which will be analyzed for temperature, salinity, pH, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, sulfides, chlorofluorocarbons, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, mercury and radioactive isotopes.