We’ve had a busy week here at MBARI. The focus has been test deployments of two profiling floats offshore of Monterey Bay with a film crew from Climate Central (Ted Blanco and Greta Shum) recording the whole process, including drone flights during the float recovery.
The next profile for float 9094 is in this morning. It will be the last one before the contest closes on the 30th. Use SOCCOMViz to examine the data:
I wrote about the spring bloom seen by our profiling floats in my last post. Those floats were all in open water. Massive phytoplankton blooms along the ice edge are a major feature of Southern Ocean waters. Our floats operate under ice and, as the ice melts back, these float can observe the ice edge blooms.
The spring bloom is well underway in the Southern Ocean. SOCCOM float 9095 at 50 degrees South shows the event quite nicely. The following figure (Fig. 1) has observations of temperature, salinity, pH at in situ temperature and pressure (on the total proton scale), oxygen, nitrate, backscatter (a measure of particle abundance), and chlorophyll that have been reported by 9095 since it was deployed on the P16S cruise in April.
We'll provide updates on interesting oceanographic observations reported by the SOCCOM profiling floats in this space. Our first report doesn't actually involve the Southern Ocean. It's from a profiling float in the North Atlantic that was near Hurricane Gonzalo and it concerns mixing of the ocean and possible biological responses. But we will compare the impact of a tropical cyclone to the amount of mixing seen in the Southern Ocean in a later post. So read on.