The main focus of the programme is to understand:

“Role and response of southern ocean to the regional and global climate variability" towards achieving this goal, following scientific themes have been identified:

• Study of the inter relationship between physical, chemical and biological elements occurring across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC) and their role in carbon sequestration and biogeochemistry.
• Investigations on the air-sea-ice interaction and to understand the role of anthropogenic aerosols over southern ocean.
• Implications of thermohaline variations in the southern ocean and the repercussion of heat and mass exchange between tropics and Polar Regions on biogeochemistry.
• Reconstruction of the paleo-environmental conditions for selected time slices during the last glacial-interglacial cycles to provide perspectives on future climate ange.
• To generate relevant/critical sea truth and atmospheric data for contributing to global climate data sets for prediction of climate models to mitigate/regulate climate change.