July 2003 - Quarterly Update

All of the plans laid in January are well under way.

CIS
When the watchdog buoy which had been attached to the sensor package was recovered the sensor package was not present. This could have been good news if only the buoy had surfaced and the sensor package might still be on station but in June Hedinn Valdimarsson was able to divert a red fish survey cruise and recover the remaining parts of the 2 CIS moorings. All except the microcat closest to the surface was recovered which means lots of delayed mode (microcat, ADCP, current meters and parflux trap) data will now be available but the sensor package was not recovered so all those sensors are now lost. The planning of the cruise to redeploy the CIS moorings is well advanced and the cruise is now scheduled to begin on 24th August.

PAP
The team from SOC fly off to join the German Research Vessel Poseidon in Ponta Delgada in the Azores It is planned to reach the PAP site early on Monday 7th July and with 6 full days programmed on site the PAP moorings will be turned around and redeployed by Sunday 13th July when they leave to recover other equipment. I am looking forward to being overloaded with the delayed mode data from the PAP site and I hope to have it displayed on the web site as soon as possible.

ESTOC
The mooring has been sending data for 80 days now. The final SAMI sensor was deployed at the DOLAN site during a later cruise and I now have some data which is being passed to me. I do not yet have the formula to convert the instrument outputs to pCO2 but I am already putting the microcat data and the DOLAN weather data onto the web site. The pCO2 will be plotted as soon as it is available. Something is currently affecting the mooring pulling it 20m deeper than usual. ICCM will investigate as this could be a natural phenomenon or some outside agency disturbing the mooring. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly.

April 2003 - Quarterly Update

This quarter has again been action packed.

At meetings in January several decisions were made: to redesign the buoyancy associated with the sensor frame to make it easier to deploy, and to design and make conductive swivels to incorporate in the mooring with the telemetry link.

Bad luck hit when the telemetry buoy on the CIS mooring went adrift in early February, but it is hoped that all the microcats are still on station and the data will become available when the buoy is serviced in the Summer. More worrying still is the fact that the CIS sensor frame has surfaced and is adrift. It was designed to send its position via ARGOS should this happen so it is hoped that this can be recovered and the reason for that mooring failing ascertained. This mooring was a very different design to the telemetry moorings and so has failed for some totally different reason. Even though the CIS site has suffered set backs Johannes Karstensen has been able to use the data already collected to produce some interesting heat budget calculations, comparing the ANIMATE data with the General Ocean Turbulence Model using NCEP/NCAR reanalysis surface flux data.

The part of the PAP mooring with several microcats was finally recovered on the 1st March 2003 but because of the battering it had received during the 14 weeks it was adrift it revealed very little about why the mooring had failed in the first place.

The positive news is that ESTOC was redeployed on 12th April and the real-time data on temperature and salinity will be soon available on the web site.

The next deployment is PAP in July which seems a long way off but there is a lot of preparation already underway making sure that all the equipment is in the right place at the right time and that the people who will be on board are trained to service the sensors .

I am looking forward to what the next quarter brings.

July 2002 - Quarterly Update

The loss of the telemetry equipment from the ESTOC site was very disappointing, just as we had built up a months worth of data and interesting patterns could start to be seen. However having the data available to be shown on the web site made it easy to track the buoy as it drifted south towards the Canary Islands.

I now have an interesting data set which I am using to refine my graphing programs and also to understand how the data is being delivered and to trace why occasionally data are being corrupted in transmission or lost entirely.

Any lessons which can be learnt from the ESTOC equipment failure will be applied to the CIS and PAP moorings which are on course for deployment in late August and late September respectively. As soon as those moorings are in place plenty of interesting data will be flowing in via the telemetry and also when ESTOC is serviced the data which is still being captured and recorded on board the remaining parts of the mooring will become available to be collated with the data which we have already received.

The next meeting of the partners in this project will be held in Reykjavik in September and I will use that opportunity to discuss the information being disseminated via the web site.

Maureen Edwards

ANIMATE Data Manager

2nd June 2002 : The ESTOC equipment which went adrift on 22nd May has now been recovered to Telde on Gran Canaria. The mooring had parted at a splice in the cabling. It should be possible to recover the remaining portion of the mooring and redeploy again on the next cruise to ESTOC which is scheduled to be in September 2002. When the mooring is serviced more data will be recovered and further analysis will be posted on this site.

17:30 17th May 2002 : It is now possible to plot graphs on-line using the data collected by the ESTOC mooring. Click here to go directly to the ESTOC data.

Noon 15th April 2002 : The ESTOC mooring has been successfully deployed with sensors to measure Temperature, Conductivity, Pressure and Fluorescence. See photos taken during the cruise by clicking here.