What a difference a day makes. Here’s a photo of a CTD launch on Oceanus this morning (9/15) giving data as we pass through these internal waves visible on the echosounder The vertical profiles show two groupings, as the internal waves heave the thermocline up and down. With some clever changes in the plotting scale, you can make fun patterns … Read More
SIO Airborne Flight (9/14/17)
Today the SIO Melville lab was limited by a persistent cloud layer but we were still able to fit in a 3.5 hour flight at a reduced altitude of 2000ft. We flew a grid pattern above the ship tracks near Guadalupe, alongshore tracks from Oceano to Purisima Point, and cross-shore tracks originating from Guadalupe and Purisima Point. Click on images … Read More
Evidence of cross-shore exchange at Oceano 20 m isobath
Here’s a quick plot from one of Sounder’s laps around the inshore box today (14 Sep 2017). The first leg goes along the 20 m isobath from the NW corner to the southwest corner. The upper 10 m of water is headed onshore (red) at ~20 cm/s, and the lower 10 m of water is headed offshore at ~ 20 … Read More
Rip currents @Guadalupe
Graduate students Alex and Spencer have been capturing drone footage of rip currents along the beach by our radar site and comparing optical versus radar observations. Above left is a snapshot of one. Rip neck and rip head are evident by their entrained sediment. Rip head is particularly interesting with its intermediate scale wave breaking and smaller scale instabilities along … Read More
Sally Ride soliton measurements
While this experiment highlights the integration of measurements made across our small armada, the scientists on each ship also integrate data from several instrument platforms. On Sally Ride, we are chasing solitons like those seen in the aerial photos from a previous post. We are using a profiling instrument (affectionately known as the Very Merry Profiler) cast over the stern … Read More