Today is a big day. I just arrived in Los Angeles from DC this afternoon, and I’m heading to Vandenberg Air Force Base in Lompoc, California, to see an Atlas 5 rocket blast Landsat 8 into space. Officially, the satellite is called the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM) until it reaches orbit safely, but I’m […]
By Eric Lindstrom “Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board.” — Zora Neale Hurston So, we are back in port in the Azores Islands of Portugal. Knorr 209-1 was a fabulous voyage and it did feel that we had many a man’s wish on board. Those included wishes for our data collection […]
By Eric Lindstrom Channel fever: an unusual excitement or restlessness common among a ship’s crew when the ship nears port after a voyage (The term probably refers to the English Channel, between southern England and northern France.) Now that all the oceanography is done, it’s four days of steaming to the Azores. During that time […]
By Eric Lindstrom When on land, an oceanography brain usually associates the term ocean motion with the movement of seawater in the form of ocean currents. However, when actually on the ocean, the biggest signal for our oceanography brains to cope with is the role of ocean motion in the pitch and roll of the […]
By Eric Lindstrom How do you spell physical oceanography? I know my answer for that question! It’s easy: CTD. For about the last 40 years, the mainstay of physical oceanography has been profiling the ocean with sensors for Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth (CTD). The SPURS cruise is no exception. These are key properties to derive […]
By Eric Lindstrom Friday, 5 October 2012 — We got a call today from the Commander of the International Space Station (ISS), Sunita “Suni” Williams. Suni, who was calling while the ISS was passing over Eastern Russia, wanted to congratulate us on our SPURS expedition. We had 30 minutes of wide-ranging conversation about life at […]
By Eric Lindstrom A team of scientists from University of Washington is focusing on long-term observations in SPURS region with autonomous instruments: Argo floats (Drs. Stephen C. Riser, Jeffrey Nystuen, and student Jessica Anderson), Seagliders (Drs. Craig Lee, Charlie Eriksen, and Luc Rainville), and Lagrangian floats (Drs. Eric D’Asaro and Andrey Shcherbina). Their sentinel instruments […]
By Eric Lindstrom A number of the instruments deployed during SPURS are “works in progress.” They work well, but need exercise in new or more challenging environments to perfect them. The whole of SPURS is an experiment, taking salinity measurement in the ocean to an entirely new level. Extended deployment of sensor webs in hostile […]
By Eric Lindstrom “The techniques I developed for studying turbulence, like weather, also apply to the stock market.” Benoit Mandelbrot If Mandelbrot’s statement is true, maybe oceanographers studying ocean microstructure (caused by turbulence), besides writing journal articles about mixing in the ocean also work on padding their retirement accounts with stunning stock market acumen? Jokes […]
