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Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
The Bridge calls down to the main lab whenever there's a whale spotting, and whoever can typically dashes out onto deck with cameras and binoculars for a chance to see... well, anything that isn't their sampling apparatus, really, and whales are perfect for that. I took these pictures while a pod of pilot whales (probably) was checking out the boat and a distance of 300 - 500m, and off on the horizon some very large whale or group of whales was spouting off some huge plumes of water, easily visible against the blue sky.
The whale spotters are (left to right) Maren, Emily, and Alba.
Read the rest of this postOriginally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
Ah, nothing like being on the North Atlantic, right? Cold, dreary, gray seas and storm after storm... we had our two little storms, and for the past week and a half the weather has been absolutely lovely. I'm CTD chief during the middle watch, midnight to 4, so it's not too hard for me to see both sunset and sunrise every day.
Ivona asked for more pics, so here they are! I'll try to find some with people in them later.
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
It sounds terrible, I know. Instead of saying "I've been trained to be a CTD hooker," how about "I've been trained to work the CTD taglines." The CTD is the big cage w/ niskin bottles that are open when lowered into the water, and closed at specific depths on the way back up. On the Knorr, there's an extendable boom that's used to put the CTD well away from the side of the ship before lowering or raising it, and that's why we need to have taglines -- ropes with self-closing hooks on the end that we attach to the sides of the CTD cage using long, heavy poles.
Read the rest of this postOriginally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
Patrick Martin, Richard Lampitt's graduate student, brought a couple 30L bottles, a CT and a weight to attach to a wire for a do-it-yourself CTD cast down to 1000m. Fortunately, there was some left over water at the ~1000m depth, which Alba Gonzalez-Posada is kindly doing duplicate oxygen titrations on, so I will have a number to help calibrate the two types of oxygen sensors on the gliders -- assuming the deep water masses are fairly similar (Labrador Seawater, presumably). That assumption may or may not bear out, but the temperature-salinity characteristics should answer that question.
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
I went shopping on our last day in Reykjavik. While everyone else wisely stocked up on chocolate, I bought myself two Icelandic wool sweaters and two CDs by Icelandic artists I'd never heard of before. Now our collaborators must suffer my fashion choices, because I wear one or the other sweater every single day -- the lab gets cold, especially when the optics people are out doing their special instrument tows and leave the main lab doors open.
Read the rest of this postOriginally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
13:50 UTC 3 May 2008: Eric and company (Patrick, Bosun... several people all bundled up so I still need to verify who all was out there handling lines) got Float 47 back on board without any hitches that I could see. Yay! Now we can head back to Float 48 and the gliders (and Checkley's float) to get started on the calibration casts and surveys.
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
It's 13:15 UTC, wind's picking up (34kt?), waves are maybe 10ft, and the bridge says they've got the float visually. Eric Rehm, Kyle the Bosun, Kevin (from Lampitt's group) are on deck to pick her up, and several others of the crew and science team are available for lending an extra hand or commentary, depending on how well it goes.
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
I went to bed as usual, around 0130, and woke up as usual, around 0645. I had fully expected to sleep until at least 0900, but... but there's a lot of light here, and a lot of work to do.
Fortunately, this delightful coffeeshop -- which my adviser exhorted me to visit during a chat session -- was on the way to the Knorr:
[inline:orange_bean.jpg=kaffitar]
Read the rest of this postOriginally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
I'm in Reykjavik now, finally showered and very caffeinated, waiting for everyone to muster in the lobby for dinner. Not that I'm hungry, but I do need to stay awake while the sun is up so I can be rested for tomorrow's work (loading the ship).
The hotel? It's like I died and went to IKEA. Everything is so crisp and simple and clean and adorable... and no matter what the beds are, they're going to be much better than the horrible airplane seat I tried to sleep in a mere 7 hours ago!
Glad to be here, and soon I get to get back to work!
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
I've been up pretty much every night past midnight, making sure the pod's in a good place for me to sleep through their next surfacing (or two). Lately I've been listening to KEXP.org via iTunes, and one of my favorite DJs (Riz!) has been doing the late night show. He often plays a sort of trippy ambient indie rock mix that is as good for piloting gliders in the wee hours as industrial/goth is good for coding in the wee hours...
The only problem is that when I hear a good song, I can buy it in a minute. Curse you, iTunes!
Originally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
The data has begun pouring in, and for some reason I volunteered to clean up and post the underway and CTD data from the deployment cruise. Don't I have gliders to be piloting right now? Yes, I do. But... I'm OCD enough with timestamps right now that I've not only transformed ascii files to matlab files, but I've also corrected the various day-rollover problems, so the timestamps are actually totally correct. Woot!
And they're in both UTC and local time! I'm really liking this whole working at 20 Degrees West thing, it certainly makes data-scrubbing a little easier.
Read the rest of this postOriginally published at North Atlantic Bloom Experiment 08 Collaboratory. You can comment here or there.
In order to lessen the amount of time I spend blogging, while still letting me post journal entries, I am consolidating my project blog and my personal blog. (This should be fine, since my personal life now consists almost entirely of The Project, anyway.) This is accomplished by a drupal module called CrossPoster. Let's see if it works...
Read the rest of this postGo Cascadia!
That modulation -- a fairly periodic signal, one up and one down roughly every 11 years -- is one of many inputs to the global temperature anomaly. When you take out all the periodic signals, you're left with an upward trend, which is the signal of global warming. The 11-year modulation is noise.
It is important to know where all the noise comes from -- all the better to understand the system and better force predictive models.
But the authors generalize their results to be proof that all "global warming" is due to the noise. And that's where the problem lies: in an effort to disprove global climate change, the authors take a valid and interesting scientific result and misconstrue it, to the detriment of us all.
Usually.
Today we had a drunk come up and stare at the glider, his beer bottle momentarily forgotten in his hand. That wasn't a problem -- I told him it was a robot we used to monitor the ocean and asked him if he had any questions, and I suspect the whole difficulty of maintaining a conversation in that state was too much for him to stand, so he wandered off with a brief "wow."
It was Mr. Sunday School who was the problem. A guy who kept bothering us with questions about what we were doing, and wanting to lecture us on how "it's all a miracle" and "someone oughta tell Al Gore" and "God made the plants, you know, because there's a reason for everything, I mean, why else are they just out there in the middle of the ocean?" It's an awkward situation, because as a representative of the university and the lab, I don't want to just completely blow this guy off, and as a scientist, I have a duty to share what I know with the community at large. I'm also well aware that not all scientists are atheists, and it would be incorrect of me to tell someone "I'm a scientist, therefore I don't agree with your strict biblical world view."
However, I am a scientist... and I can't help but notice the people who say "Nature is a marvel of God" are often also the ones who also say "He had a reason for making it this way, so we don't have to do anything or learn anything about it, and it's all going to be OK because He Said So." Faith is no excuse for ignorance.
So there he was, getting in the way -- and unlike the drunk, Mr. Sunday School didn't take the hint. I ended up doing what you do with any troll: after polite chatting for 5 minutes, I turned around and got back to work. The midwestern in me is all like "that's so ruuuude!" and the rest of me is all "nowhere near as rude as he was being to us."
Here I am in grad school, and when my textbooks and lecture notes fail me, I go to wikipedia. Thank you Wikipedia, you're my hero!
Dr. Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), will give two lectures on March 5th and 6th on sea level rise. Dr. Steffen's lecture is part of the first annual
JISAO lecture series titled "Climate Change: A Wake Up Call"
Sea Level Rise and Ice Sheets
Wednesday, March 5, 2008, 7:30 - 8:30
Pacific Science Center, Eames IMAX Theatre
Admission to each Eames IMAX lecture is $5.00. Admission is FREE to Faculty, Staff and Students of the University of Washington, Pacific Science Center Members, and Town Hall Members.
Cryospheric Response to Climate Change
Thursday, March 6, 2008, 7:30 - 8:30
UW, Kane Hall, Room 210 (Admission FREE).
The skinny:
Air temperatures on the Greenland ice sheet have increased by 4 deg C since 1991. The ice sheet melt area increased by 30% for the western part between 1979-2006. The increasing trend in the total area of melting
bare ice is unmistakable at 13% per year, significant at a probability of 0.99. Hence, the bare ice region, the wet snow region, and the equilibrium line altitude have moved further inland and resulting in increased melt water flux towards the coast. Increase in ice velocity in the ablation region and the concurrent increase in melt water suggests that water penetrates to great depth through moulins and cracks, lubricating the bottom of the ice sheet. New insight was gained of subsurface hydrologic channels and cavities using new instrumentation and a video system during the melt peak in August 2007. These new results will be discussed in view of the rapid increase in melt area and mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet due to increasing air temperatures.
