At Sea, Tropical North Atlantic
Today we are continuing our passage from Ascension Island to the Cape Verde Islands. At about 0800 we spotted a buoy ahead of the ship, nearly on our track. As we came closer we realized that is was an oceanographic buoy deployed by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We had a list of the buoys which NOAA has deployed in the tropical Atlantic and this buoy was on that list, so we gave the instrumented buoy a wide berth so as not to disturb the measurements. Still, at our closest point of approach we could see that the buoy was part of the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array. Deployment of this array was begun in the Pacific in 1984 and completed in 1994. There are currently 70 moorings along the equator and on both sides between 10° N and S which are maintained by NOAA and Japan. In recent years the array has been extended into the Atlantic as part of a project called CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Prediction) centered at Southampton, UK.
These buoys carry a string of temperature sensors, and sometimes Acoustic Doppler Current Meters together with a complete array of meteorological instruments which telemeter data via satellite to scientists all over the world. Eventually the goal is to instrument the entire ocean with arrays like these as well as other sensor arrays which may sit permanently on the bottom or be permanently moored in the water column.
This represents the coming era of ocean science in which instead of sailing over the surface of the ocean on research ships and lowering instruments into the water, the instruments themselves will be permanently positioned in the environment as what are called "Global Ocean Observing Systems (GOOS)." Because the ocean and the atmosphere change on timescales of days and weeks, trying to study them from surface ships inevitably means that the sampling pattern will miss some of the important variability, a problem known as "aliasing." Sampling the entire system simultaneously, or "synoptically" will remove this problem and greatly improve our ability to understand and perhaps eventually predict the behaviour of these systems which are so important to the quality of our environment.
Today we are continuing our passage from Ascension Island to the Cape Verde Islands. At about 0800 we spotted a buoy ahead of the ship, nearly on our track. As we came closer we realized that is was an oceanographic buoy deployed by the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). We had a list of the buoys which NOAA has deployed in the tropical Atlantic and this buoy was on that list, so we gave the instrumented buoy a wide berth so as not to disturb the measurements. Still, at our closest point of approach we could see that the buoy was part of the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) array. Deployment of this array was begun in the Pacific in 1984 and completed in 1994. There are currently 70 moorings along the equator and on both sides between 10° N and S which are maintained by NOAA and Japan. In recent years the array has been extended into the Atlantic as part of a project called CLIVAR (Climate Variability and Prediction) centered at Southampton, UK.
These buoys carry a string of temperature sensors, and sometimes Acoustic Doppler Current Meters together with a complete array of meteorological instruments which telemeter data via satellite to scientists all over the world. Eventually the goal is to instrument the entire ocean with arrays like these as well as other sensor arrays which may sit permanently on the bottom or be permanently moored in the water column.
This represents the coming era of ocean science in which instead of sailing over the surface of the ocean on research ships and lowering instruments into the water, the instruments themselves will be permanently positioned in the environment as what are called "Global Ocean Observing Systems (GOOS)." Because the ocean and the atmosphere change on timescales of days and weeks, trying to study them from surface ships inevitably means that the sampling pattern will miss some of the important variability, a problem known as "aliasing." Sampling the entire system simultaneously, or "synoptically" will remove this problem and greatly improve our ability to understand and perhaps eventually predict the behaviour of these systems which are so important to the quality of our environment.
