The weather continues to improve as we steam south and away from the remnants of Humberto. Today was mostly sunny with just a few scattered showers and 10-12 kt winds. Very pleasant. The water is crystal clear, about 25 C (77 F), and we're definitely heading into the Atlantic salinity maximum -- surface salinities rose from 36.7 to 37.4 over the past 24 hours / 250 nm.
After supper this evening we completed our first 2000 m CTD cast at 30 deg N. Two shallower test casts last night uncovered a damaged electrical connection on a Sea-Bird pump that resulted in noisy, contaminated data. Endeavor's everywhere-all-the-time survey tech, Lynne Butler (above) figured this out quickly and swapped in a new pump and cable.
We had a bit of a scare during the same cast last night when the conducting wire jumped a sheave on the main traction winch -- bringing the upcast to a grinding halt. On went the chinese fingers to hold the weight of the instrument package while the engineers made repairs. For today's cast we switched over to the #2 hydrographic winch and everything worked smoothly. Our tiny science party (5 people) is fortunate that the capable crew of Endeavor is always there to help.
Unlike many physical oceanographic cruises, ship-based CTD profiling of temperature and salinity is not a central element of the SPURS fieldwork. Rather, for the past 12 months, the SPURS program has employed a persistent autonomous observing system consisting of drifters, floats, gliders, Wave Gliders, and moorings. You can see the present status of all of these platforms on the SPURS project website: http://spurs.jpl.nasa.gov/SPURS/
No comments:
Post a Comment