Could we be any luckier? After a week or more of strong winds from the south and southwest that produced upwelling conditions along the New Jersey Coast, late yesterday afternoon the wind shifted north west and peaked at 20 knots at the Ambrose buoy. On monday we sampled across the upwelling front off New Jersey. Because of the wind shift, today we will be sampling under downwelling conditions with the Hudson-Raritan estuarine plume streaming like a river along the New Jersey coast. The 1400 GMT NYHOPs model forecast of salinity and currents is plotted on the left. Our start and end points for the morning exploratory transect are indicated by the red symbols off the Coast. The white symbol is the approximate position of the eastern edge of the Hudson River Plume forecast by the NYHOPs model. We will run the exploratory transect quickly with our acoustic and surface CTD to confirm the position of the plume front in the model before we start fishing. Somebody on board just sighted a whale to the north outside the mouth of the estuary where in the distance we can also see the Verizano bridge and Manhattan towers burning in sunlight and clawing their way higher into the sky.
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