The Near Inertial Shear and Kinetic Energy in the North Atlantic experiment (NISKINe) sailed out.4/29/2019 A couple of days ago, the Icelandic weather finally provided with a good window opportunity and the NISKINe operation successfully deployed their instruments. The Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) confirmed that a 24 hours window was available, so we run and packed our gear and sailed west. There, we deployed a couple of assets in international waters and started to get in situ information on weather, wave, and ocean characteristics. My Icelandic collaborator from the IMO and I, we were glad to have this team and their cutting-edge technologies around and we hope them good and interesting results.
NISKINe is an Office of Naval Research (ONR) experiment bringing together observationalists, modelers, and theorists physical oceanographers to explore the near-inertial frequency dominating the upper ocean shear and substantially contribute to upper ocean turbulence. Therefore, the experiment involves collaboration between numerous research institutions from the United States and Iceland.
The investigation focusses on an area southeast of Iceland were waves up to 16 meters-high have been observed. There, the upper ocean will be sampled with numerous autonomous platforms and ship measurements that will provide with very interesting results on oceanic waves and mixing. Later, modelers and theorists will contribute to the overall knowledge by helping to understand the observations and simulating the field. This past week we have been preparing some assets to be deployed in the ocean before the research vessel arrives. However, the deploying date keeps being postponed because currently the weather in Iceland is characterized by a train of storms passing by, and for example today, we are experiencing guts that go up to 25 m/s. Though is beautiful to see the power that nature has at these latitudes, We can't wait to deploy the instrumentation and start to get interesting results!! Weather can be checked here (by the way, a great colormap). |
Archives
April 2024
|