RV Knorr: Floats Galore
Submitted by erehm on Mon, 05/12/2008 - 01:26.Here's a quick summary of activities on Sunday, 11 May 2008:
- Finished a 15 nm bowtie survey with CTD stations at the vertices.
- Held a one hour science meeting to discuss observations so far. (Look for an upcoming report summarizing this discussion.)
- Using a prediction of Biofloat 48's location, pre-positioned ourselves before surfacing. We were within 6 nm of the float when it surfaced.
No news is good news
Submitted by dasaro on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 02:25.Not much new to report. The Knorr folks must be very busy, but I have few details. The ship completed a large survey a few days ago and is now doing important things.
Floats and gliders continue to operate well. The glider pilots continue to increase in skill and the gliders are now operating consistently close enough to the floats that we can begin to map the variability.
The float is getting closer to Iceland. This was not anticipated in drift climatologies. At worst, we may drift into Denmark Strait, which is not so bad.
Floats: 48 Operational, Ready 47 to redeploy
Submitted by dasaro on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 02:19.Float 48 continues to work well, with little evidence of sensor drift. The recent light winds have made it more buoyant near the surface, probably due to bubbles, which presents a continual ballasting challenge.
The problem with float 47 appears to be a reproducible 'feature' not a bug. The float is operational, but we can't safely restart it if it crashes. We will run test missions over the next few days and then redeploy it as a 'hot spare' near the end of the Knorr cruise.
Bloom Intensity Varies on Scales Less than 10 km
Submitted by blmadmn on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 02:13.The image shows a map of 700nm backscatter from the combined float and glider sensors over the last few days. Variations of about a factor of 2 are seen over scales of 10 km or less.
Seagliders: Calibration CTD Casts Complete
Submitted by graya on Sat, 05/10/2008 - 14:03.Emboldened by the smoothness of glider calibration casts on the 5th and 6th of May and hurried by weather reports of a looming storm, we took advantage of the close proximity of the gliders to perform the remaining two glider calibrations back-to-back on the morning of 7 May. SG143's CTD calibration cast took place first, at a distance of ~200m from the glider and with SG143 spending a total of 18 minutes on the surface. It was a little tricky because 143 has been diving faster than the other gliders, and popped up after its medium-length set-up dive half an hour early -- during breakfast.
