Field Activities: 2015 October Western Boundary Time Series cruise

Six AOML/PhOD scientists, Chris Meinen, Uli Rivero, Pedro Peña, Grant Rawson, Jay Hooper, and Tom Sevilla joined with colleagues from UM/RSMAS aboard the R/V Endeavor for a 17 day research cruise to study the western boundary components of the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) at 26N during October 3-19, 2015.

During the cruise 44 high-quality CTD profiles were collected, data from five pressure-equipped inverted echo sounder (PIES) moorings were acoustically downloaded, one new PIES mooring was deployed, and one prototype PIES-datapod system was also deployed. The scientists also recovered and deployed three tall and one short bottom-pressure mooring. The success of this cruise, together with a British cruise taking place later in October-November, provides the data needed to extend the basin-wide MOC dataset to eleven and a half years. These measurements are crucial for the study of climate system and the impact of the ocean on socially important quantities such as hurricane intensification, precipitation pattern changes, and sea-level rise. Maintaining these long-term climate records remains a key task for the international scientific community. Furthermore, in addition to providing crucial data for understanding the climate system, these data represent crucial validation tools for improving state-of-the-art ocean and coupled climate model simulations.

Figure 1: AOML/PhOD members Tom Seville and Ulises Rivero working with the ship survey technician to deploy the CTD package during the October 2015 MOCHA-WBTS cruise on the R/V Endeavor.

Figure 2: The science team for the October 2015 MOCHA-WBTS cruise on the R/V Endeavor.