Arrival

The Race is On

Seatime math

Today is day 16 of this trip (out of 33 planned), which is also my previous 'longest-time-at-sea'.

However, that last trip was on Coyote, a 42 ft. sailboat, whereas this trip is on a 274 ft. top of the line research ship.

Looking at the ratios of days out to length of ship (days/LOA), this trip is equivalent to ~2.5 days on a 42 ft. boat. Put another way, I would have to stay at sea for 104 days on this ship to match my previous sea time (by this meaningless metric).

As you may notice I've got some time on my hands to think about these things.

 
 My commute.


Calmest day of the trip today.

Cape Verde

 Boa Vista, the easternmost island of the Republic of Cape Verde.

All the dust in the air, blowing off the Saharan desert, makes for hazy days but pretty amazing sunsets.

14.75N 22.75W

Two weeks in

Yesterday we recovered and deployed buoys at 20N 23W. While there the crew made the most of it and caught a few of the tuna that live around the moorings. Sashimi appetizer with dinner.  The next week or so we will be heading due South along 23W, visiting 3 more buoy sites until the equator.

Turning downwind has made a huge difference in the ship's motion. Again, surprising how similar such a large ship can be to a small sailboat in these regards.

The skies are hazy, and the buoys are covered in a thick layer of dust, blown out to sea from the Saharan desert. One of the research groups onboard is focused specifically on the role of this atmospheric dust in hurricane formation, as it alters the exchange of heat between atmosphere and ocean.

Today we will pass through the Cape Verde Islands, close enough to see, but not to step ashore. For that we have to wait until Cape Town.

17.5N 22.75W

Today feels like...

First Buoy Ops

Deployed a hydrophone mooring and recovered a PIRATA mooring. Tonight we will remain on station for CTD casts, and at first light deploy a new PIRATA mooring.

Halfway Across the Atlantic

Last night we crossed the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. We've entered the trades, and are steaming at about 13kts into ~15kts of wind and 2m seas. Bit choppy onboard, and the decks are now covered in salt spray. Tomorrow will be our first day of buoy ops, first deploying a subsurface hydrophone mooring, then recovering one of the Atlas moorings. The two buoys seen in the above picture will then be deployed side-by-side to allow for an intercomparison of the data collected by the old (ATLAS) and new (TFLEX) buoys.

Outbound

Departure day

Ship Tracker

You should be able to track this cruise at the NOAA ship tracker:
http://shiptracker.noaa.gov/default.aspx
Ship: Ron Brown

Currently in port, Charleston SC, waiting for a Thursday departure.

Climate Change Infographic

From visual.ly - click for full size.

Tropical Pacific Weather

The U. of Hawaii Meteorology department offers a great compendium of tropical weather resources. Plus they couple all this cutting edge numerical modeling and satellite technology with the ability to build animated gifs...

Click to activate some old school animated gif action

Available here:
http://weather.hawaii.edu/

In search of unfair competitive advantage (aka Puget Sound current models)

After extensive and painstaking research involving repeated instances watching our fleet walk away from us by taking advantage of the vagaries of Puget Sound tidal currents, we decided that these currents are perhaps indeed worth paying attention to. 

One could of course go down to the local chandlery and buy a copy of an established and well-vetted current atlas that would be both inexpensive and easily used onboard. That however has the disadvantage of requiring leaving the office desk and being entirely too practical. 

Instead, we'll turn to the MoSSEA (Modeling the Salish Sea) research work being done at the University of Washington. This hindcasting effort uses the Regional Ocean Modeling System (ROMS) with atmospheric, river, and tidal forcing to create high resolution models of the Puget Sound circulation system. 

I am currently making a general pest of myself bugging busy people to give me true current velocity outputs, and if I get these I will probably keep them to myself in search of the aforementioned 'unfair competitive advantage.' However, here are some publicly available toys to take a look at:

 

While I couldn't find any explicit surface current output available from the MoSSea project, I did find this nice animation of surface salinity over a spring-neap tidal cycle. Mixing significantly complicates the use of salinity as a tracer of currents, but it is still interesting to watch this animation for some of the complex eddies and other features relevant to sailing. Click here for animation.

 

The other fun toy worth looking at is flowWeaver, a visualization tool built on the same MoSSea model as the animation. This will most likely be available at some point as a web app, but in the meantime you can download it and run it on your local machine. Mousing over the map reveals the deep and surface paths that a water parcel at your chosen location would take over a two week period. Clicking on the map releases a 'particle' for you to track, and clicking and dragging animates a section of the map. Click here for flowWeaver.

Tracking COYOTE

Tracking COYOTE in the 2010 Pac Cup and return. Surface level pressure in color, wind vectors in blue, and 500 hPa height in white. Rough boat position shown with circle.

Data from NCEP 4x daily reanalysis.

Full screen is most highly recommended.

The good ship TAO seeks a leper colony.

 

20 years of trade wind goodness. Assume that your experience will be very unlike what is shown here. Note however the relative stability of the Pacific high moving into the summer, as well as the decrease in overall wind speed.