We are just shy of one week at sea aboard the R/V Sally Ride and with a combination of groups from SIO (MOD and Send labs) and the WHOI (CPIES Team led by me, Magadalena Andres). We are all working hard, side by side, as there is a lot happening on this cruise!  

This is my first cruise that includes both CPIES recoveries and CPIES deployments…usually it’s one or the other and I put myself in the mindset for that type of cruise.  And unusually a cruise is related to a single project, but here our efforts are serving both the SWOT Cal/Val mission and the NOPP NGIW program…consequently, there is a lot of gear coming onto the ship after spending 7 months in the water and a lot of fresh gear going over the side to spend another 7 month in the deep. 

So far, the three of us on the CPIES Team—myself (a WHOI Scientist), Brian Hogue (WHOI mooring engineer), and Austin Liou (WHOI research associate) —have recovered a CPIES that was deployed in February 2023 to augment the SWOT Cal/Val Array. 

Our plan now is to deploy another 9 CPIES in a circle that will surround SIO’s central mooring as part of the NOPP NGIW Internal Wave Resolving Array.  So far we have deployed half of those! The mooring team plans to deploy the central mooring today and then that Internal Wave Resolving Array will stay in the water for about a year at this site until we return on the R/V Sally Ride to recover the instruments next October. 

The SIO Mooring Team—Drew Lucas, Matthias Lankhorst, Spencer Kawamoto, Sara Goheen, Romain Heux, Drew Cole, Noah Howins, Mars Rafto, and Cindy—recovered four moorings that were deployed last February as an integral part of the SWOT Cal/Val Array….these moorings used novel technology to measure the upper ocean with incredible vertical resolution and the first look at the data is amazing! The team is working hard now to turn around instrumentation from those moorings that will go on today’s mooring deployment.

And, of course, what would a research cruise be without CTD casts! On this cruise, we are doing lots of CTD casts interspersed between the recoveries and deployments: shallow ones to about 1000 m depth and the (interminable) full-water column casts at each CPIES site. Those casts reach to 4500 m depth and each one takes a couple of hours to complete.  Matthias is keeping those on track, ably assisted by NOPP postdoc based at USM Dheeraj Varma.

Stay tuned for more updates! 

Magdalena Andres, dispatch as part of the IWR Team at sea on the R/V Sally Ride

Leaving Alameda on September 13 2023, we passed by Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge on our way to the SWOT Cal/Val crossover site west of California.

An early morning deployment for the CPIES Team.