What are we doing here?

Reading Rafael's post on the blog yesterday I realised that there are just two scientists who hadn't yet written anything - and I didn't want to be last.  I am David and in Gerard's classification of oceanographers (students or grizzled sea-scientists) I fall into the latter.

You will have already read that we are currently travelling between Southampton, the Canaries and the Bahamas.  You might also have thought that this sounds like the itinerary of a holiday cruise rather than a research endeavour.  So what are we doing here?

The sun heats the equatorial regions more strongly than higher latitudes and the ocean and atmosphere redistribute the heat transporting it form the tropics towards the North and South poles.  There is though a remarkable exception.  In the South Atlantic the ocean transports heat towards the equator.  As a consequence the North Atlantic transports more heat northwards and this has an important impact on the climate of northwest Europe.  The  RAPID project measures the poleward heat transport in the North Atlantic ocean.

This is my first time on a RAPID project cruise but the work has been going on since 2004.   There isn't another project like this anywhere else and the measurements we make are widely used by climate scientists.  We are really quite proud of it.

You might still be asking why measure the heat transport at the latitude of the Bahamas and not somewhere else?  There are a couple of reasons. This is the latitude at which the northward transport of heat is greatest - about 1.3 PW (1.3 quadrillion Watts).  It is also a latitude at which the Gulf Stream is constrained in the Florida Strait and that has been monitored by our colleague in Florida AOML and RSMAS for many years.

Below are some of the instruments used to monitor the ocean.   We are deploying about 170 altogether - considering the size of the ocean the number required seems surprisingly few.



David

Microcats in the Deck Lab. Microcats are instruments that measure temperature, salinity and pressure on a mooring