And a Cruise to New York

06/29/2010 11:46:04

We are on our way to sample off New York today. After the coin flip at the start of each 4 day cruise we alternate sampling the seascapes so that if conditions change dramatically due to a storm we are not left sampling one seascape in dramatically different oceanographic conditions.  If we do get a storm we want to be able to sample in both seascapes immediately afterwards so we can measure the seascape differences in the "supply side" ecology?  If we were truly sampling adaptively we would sample whenever the oceanography developed that we wanted to explore. Unfortunately the nature of ship time makes that difficult to do.

Today the wind is out of the west south west (250T) at 10 knots at the Ambrose Bouy. We have a number of good Satellite and HF radar images today and that observational data is similar to the NYHOPs model pictured above.  As a result we are using the surface temperature and current flow from NYHOPs to route todays cruise. The forecast shows cold salty water near the shoreline of Long Island, and warm salty water offshore on the surface.   Our plan is to do a rapid morning transect  using just the surface CTD and acoustic instruments from the nearshore into the warm water bulge offshore before we put the net in the water. (between the red pushpins)