Temperature Analysis of Silbo
Hey all,
This week we took a look at the synoptic temperature data for the first leg of the challenger mission.
Chris pointed out that we can see as the remnants of Hurricane Irene came through, reverberations could be felt all the way down to nearly 400m. This could be a result of the strong winds that caused a mixing effect.
Holly added that at depths of 1000m for the first half of the mission (from deployment on 6/23-8/22), the temperature was down around 6°C. However, after this point, something seems to have happened where the water started mixing much lower causing the waters at depth to become warmer.
Jess also took a step back and looked at the big picture analyzing the data from the entire mission. She noted that when the glider was deployed off of Iceland, the waters were not very stratified and that only the surface waters reflected a warming effect from the sun. As silbo continues south, the water has become more stratified and the depths to which the warmer temperatures reach has continued to go deeper.
Finally I would like to add that as we have gone through this mission, silbo has been really relying on the currents from the large number of eddies to make his progress south (unfortunately they have not always been completely useful). These eddies have a gyring effect and the warm, clockwise spinning eddies can be seen quite clearly on this cross section. Each cone shaped heat anomaly represents one of the warm eddies that we crossed throughout this mission. As we can see, since about Sept 20th, there has been a very intense heat flux into the depths that has almost reached to 1000m. This is the warm eddy we have been battling for about the past week that has produced some of the strongest currents we have seen over the course of the entire mission.
For next week we will start playing with pro plot and getting the silbo data into matlab to plot individual dives.
Chris, Holly, Jess, Eva & Nilsen
Tags: Nilsen Strandskov
where I can download proplot?