Finally, blog readers, it's the turn of your blog author to tell you a little bit about his involvement in the DIMES project!
Where do you work and what is your connection to DIMES?
I work at the National Oceanography Centre,
Southampton as a DIMES postdoctoral researcher with Alberto Naveira Garabato.
My contribution to DIMES is primarily to work on data from the UK mooring
array, which forms an integral part of the project.
What’s the purpose of the moorings?
The two-year long deployment aims
to uncover some of the underlying mechanisms that lead to mixing in the
Southern Ocean. Many previous studies have suggested that ocean turbulence is
enhanced when internal waves found between different density layers in the
ocean break. We believe that the generation of these internal waves is greater
over regions where the sea floor is relatively rough. To test this idea, the
DIMES mooring array was located over a 10 km-wide sea floor bump in the Scotia
Sea, in a region where the bottom currents are relatively strong. In addition,
the moorings allow us to quantify the energy budget of the region, including
the transfers of energy between the large-scale currents, eddies and internal
waves.
Which sorts of instruments do you use to
test these ideas?
In total, there are over 70 individual
instruments on the UK moorings. These include current meters which measure
water speed and direction and Microcats which measure temperature, salinity and
pressure. In addition, we use a number of more sophisticated instruments
including an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) which measures currents
at a number of different depth levels simultaneously, and a McLane Moored
Profiler which moves up and down the mooring wire obtaining measurements of
current speed, temperature and salinity every few seconds. Having such a wide
range of different sensors is enabling us to understand the time-varying
processes at work.
What sorts of things have you been doing on
the cruise?
I have primarily been responsible for the
data acquisition and processing of the mooring data. This includes helping the
technical team to document, move and clean up the instruments as they come back
on board, as well as downloading and quality-controlling the data. I am really
looking forward to getting my teeth into the data when I get back to
Southampton as we have had a really successful second year with only a couple
of instrument failures.
In addition to my work duties, I have also
taken some time to write the cruise blog – I hope you have all enjoyed reading it as
much as I have enjoyed writing it!
What’s it been like writing the blog?
It has been a great opportunity to show to
the world a little bit of what we do and to inspire other people to come and
work in oceanography. From a science perspective, the Southern Ocean is one of
the least well-understood parts of the planet yet it seems to have a critical
role both in ocean circulation and in the carbon cycling. I hope that through
the words and pictures that people have contributed to the blog we have managed
to convey some of our enthusiasm for this fascinating place.
