Playing chicken with the string of late-winter Pacific storms and racing the clock to deploy a ship-load of scientific gear within the SWOT Cal/Val site west of California, the crew and scientists on the MV Bold Horizon have had an intense cruise. Among them is Jessica Kozik – not only is Jess the only cruise participant from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), but she also happens to be the only woman aboard. And she’s working with an instrument that is pretty new to her.

Jess is here to deploy 3 current- and pressure-sensor equipped inverted echo sounders (or CPIESs for short) from the WHOI CPIES-Lab. She is very experienced at sea and has worked with a lot of different oceanographic instrumentation, but this is only the second time Jess has encountered CPIESs – and this time she is 100% responsible for their setup and deployment at the SWOT Cal/Val site.

After being ably deployed by Jess, these CPIESs, will sit on the seabed near 3 of the tall moorings. Each CPIESs will measure bottom pressure, near bottom horizontal currents, and vertical acoustic travel time (which can tell scientist about variability in the thermocline). The instruments will provide hourly measurements from now until the fall when they are recovered. At that point they’ll be replaced by 9 new CPIESs as part of a larger Internal Wave Resolving Array at this site.

In the photo here, Jess is aboard the RV Neil Armstrong in January 2023 learning how to deploy CPIESs – in this case, she helped deployed in the US East Coast SWOT cross-over site east of Cape Hatteras, NC. That cruise served as Jess’s CPIES deployment training…just a month later she is deploying the CPIESs in the SWOT cal/val array…solo!

— Magdalena and the IWR array team