Ready.....set.......

Though there have been some (substantial) fieldwork efforts going on here and there during this last pandemic year, like most of the world most of us have been stuck closer to home. With things stabilizing a bit (at least in the US) we are starting up again with our normal level of crazy :) Heading out in June are two fun and hopefully exciting projects in two very different parts of the world, looking at quite different things.

• The Boundary Layer Turbulence project will take place in the far North Atlantic. The MOD team and colleagues from several other universities will be delving into the deep dark ocean with some new tools, to see what processes turbulently mix water at the very bottom of the sea, where the ocean rubs on the seafloor. Spoiler alert - those ethereal lurking mysteries may hold a clue for how the whole ocean overturns. Stay tuned for more from them as they set sail soon.

• Half a world away, the SUNRISE project will take place in the sweltering Gulf of Mexico. This one is looking at surface processes, specifically how strong fronts associated with Mississippi and other river outflows interact with wind-driven oscillations in the surface ocean, and how they conspire to move heat, salt and nutrients around the coastal ocean.

Stay tuned for dueling updates!!

Debuting our new towed Phased Array Doppler Sonar

Engineers Jonathan Ladner, Riley Baird and Sara Goheen are excited about the new instrument!

Though this year has been hard and different in so very many ways, one small up-side from the reduced fieldwork has been the opportunity to make progress with some new development projects. Building off of previous pioneering advances of Rob Pinkel, Jerry Smith and Mike Goldin, the group has been hard at work designing and building a new phased array. Normally, ‘Doppler Sonars’ in the ocean are mounted on a ship or moored, and measure a profile of ocean currents in one direction, by sending out acoustic signals, looking for the doppler shift of the reflected response from moving currents (think sound of passing trains), and range-gating the results to get a measure of ocean currents as a function, say , of depth below a ship. As a ship drives around, that allows us to map out ocean currents in two dimensions (depth below ship, and along the ship track). With a phased array, beams can be formed in multiple directions, allowing us to see a ‘wedge’ of ocean currents, not just a single profile. The hope of this new instrument is that if we tow a phased array behind a ship, it can map out volumes of near-synoptic ocean currents, which will let us better understand the complex and rapidly evolving structures of turbulence, submesoscale instabilities, frontal dynamics, and more! Last week the team headed out on the R/V Sproul and did some debut towing and testing of our new vehicle.

Look out Fast CTD!

The Fast CTD encounters ice for the first time.  

Arctic Aloha

We've spent the last few days in Nome, Alaska, loading the R/V Sikuliaq and preparing to set sail. We have been gifted with unusually warm sunny weather, and are celebrating with Aloha Friday.  We set sail tomorrow morning for points further north, wish us luck!

Photo: Members of the MOD group Jen MacKinnon, Giulio Meille, honorary member Ben Barton (Bangor U.), Effie Fine, Jonny Ladner, Sara Goheen, Nicole Couto, San Nguyen, and Mike Goldin. 

Ready.....set....

8 members of the MOD group are gearing up to head to Nome, Alaska next week,  with a dozen colleagues from other universities, to embark on a month-long expedition to study the Arctic Ocean.  The project is an Office of Naval Research funded experiment entitled the "Stratified Ocean Dynamics of the Arctic (SODA)". One of the main goals is to understand what processes set the amount and distribution of heat in the Arctic ocean, and how that accumulated ocean heat might or might not be responsible for the observed accelerating rate of Arctic sea ice loss.  We'll add a series of posts once we get underway with more details of the science, instruments, people, and maybe even a polar bear sighting!  Bu to start us off, here's an image from the the National Snow and Ice Data Center (http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/).  It's a map of the Arctic Ocean as would be seen from above (satellite).  The white area is where there is currently sea ice as of today, August 24th.  The orange line is where the sea ice extent used to be, on average.  There's a lot less now, which has significant implications for not only the Arctic ecosystem and the human population surrounding it, but the global climate as well.  We are hoping that some of the secrets we uncover will help us not only understand what's happening now, but more accurately predict how this will play out as the earth continues to warm.  Stay tuned!  

Inner Shelf extravaganza gets underway!

Scientists from ours and other groups at Scripps, as well as other institutions around the country, are gearing up for a major initiative to better understand the "inner shelf".  This is the region just offshore of the surf zone (yes that is the technical term) but still in the relatively shallow water of the coastal ocean.  This area is governed by unique but complex physical processes, including wind-driven circulation, upwelling, breaking waves, wakes and instabilities, and internal waves (that ride on density interfaces below the surface).  Funded by the Office of Naval Research, we will spend the next couple months observing and trying to detangle the complexities of this system using a combination of mooring and ship-based observations.  Befitting the complexities of this part of the ocean, we are attacking with with everything but the kitchen sink, including a staggering 119 moorings(!), 7 ships (!) working in concert, arrays of drifters, dedicated scientific aircraft surveys, and more.  We're just loading up gear right now, more details once we get underway!  https://scripps.ucsd.edu/projects/innershelf/readying-gear-on-the-rv-sally-ride/