The Japanese government is sponsoring a project that will see atmospheric observation equipment installed on Iino Kaiun Kaisha’s four-year-old VLCC, Fujisan Maru, to track greenhouse gas emissions across the Indian Ocean. The ship, on charter to Idemitsu Tanker, tends to focus on Japan to Middle East routes.
Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) has been conducting shipboard observations in the Pacific Ocean for many years, but the Indian Ocean has remained a largely unobserved area.
NIES conducts high-precision observations of greenhouse gas concentrations using various platforms such as ground stations, commercial vessels and aircraft to monitor the distribution and increase of global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.