Howdy,

This week, the CODAR group (Mike and Lisa) worked on getting a contour map of the surface currents into google earth. A contour map is a map of the average velocities of all the vectors. The contour map is now being overlayed as an image in google earth every hour. We have run into a few problems matching up the map with the surface vectors, because the Spain coverage keeps changing. If the coverage changes again, we are going to have to manually change the coordinates of the image overlay in the KML.

Here is how it looks.

contourmap

Red is 50cm/s and the darkest shade of blue is 0cm/s. As of this blog, the currents are moving mostly in a Northeast direction at 20-30cm/s. As you can see from this image, in the Southwestern most part of the plot, the surface current velocity is 35 cm/s. We need the second CODAR site to start functioning correctly, because as we have witnessed previously, the stronger currents are located where the coverage drops out. In these areas of dropped coverage, surface velocities may be greater than 50 cm/s, which is too fast for RU27. The currents are still being erratic, having no set pattern. It varies from day to day.

This past week, we also started working on the Wind Data for the North Atlantic. Unfortunately, we have not successfully put it into Google Earth, but it will not be too long before we do.

Hasta Luego,

Mike and Lisa