Thompson Report May 26

Thompson Report for May 24- 26. (Saturday May 26 at 21:30 local time.)

I missed a couple days of reporting. We had one generator go out on Thursday or Friday. It took some time to reboot all the computer systems and there were some problems with e-mail. Our sampling is going very well with only a few problems and short delays.

We are continuing repeated turbulence and pumped profiling transects along the CH-line. On May 26, WECOMA joined us and did a small box survey, net tows, and CTD casts. We will do one last profiling transect Sunday morning, and WECOMA will repeat the northern small box survey. In addition to the pumped profiles, we are doing fixed depth pump station profiles for CH-1, midshelf (between CH-3 and 4), and CH-6). Burke?s pump was down for 5 hours yesterday but apart from that all systems are working well. For the pumped profiles we have the complete set of optical measurements (including FRRF), five nutrients, pCO2, and oxygen.

At the end of tomorrow?s sampling we will have completed 12 transects with turbulence and pumped profiling, and 13 fixed depth pump stations (7 nearshore at CH-1, 3 at midshelf and 3 offshore at CH-6). The fixed depth pump stations will provide chemical calibrations for particulate carbon and nitrogen, dissolved organic carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, chlorophyll and HPLC pigments. We have a fantastic time series through recently upwelled waters, several days of relaxation, and another upwelling with winds just starting to relax again. Moum?s profiling shows very interesting horizontal layers of turbidity developing inshore at depths of 20 to 50 m and moving offshore. We are able to see a very strong bottom benthic layer (low light transmission), which we are sampling during the vertical profiling and during the fixed depth pump sampling. Today we also took Fe samples with the profiling pump for comparison with Zanna?s sampling aboard the WECOMA.

Early afternoon tomorrow (Sunday), we will head south with WECOMA. WECOMA will spend 36 h completing a small box survey around the CP-line. Our vertical profiling along the CP-line will take about 42 h for one transect. We plan to spend May 28 through June 2 along the CP line. Results from the CH-line show enough variation each day that occupying one line for a time series makes more sense than moving back and forth between sites.

Pat Wheeler