Two NOAA floats are away! We’ve had great weather and deployed both of the NOAA floats on May 7. The first was at 2:30 in the morning and the second at 7pm that evening. These join a network of biogeochemical Argo floats that GO-BGC is also part of.
A quick primer on how deployments go down. The bridge crew slows the ship down as we approach the target coordinates. We’ve been steaming along at around 12 knots but need to be going only about 1 knot to safely deploy. Down in the lab, I prep the floats, which mostly consists of cleaning a few sensor windows. And then the marine techs Ella and Catie (called SSSGs, which stands for Shipboard Scientific Services Groups) facilitate the deployment. We carry the float to the back deck and deploy it by hand-lowering it with line (rope). The whole thing hopefully only slows the ship down 20-30 minutes. And then each float provides years and years of valuable, publicly-available data.
Next up are the two Scripps GO-BGC floats; keep an eye out for pictures of those in the next few days. They’re my new favorites!
All photos by Matt Skorina of WHOI’s Alvin team
Melissa helps SSSGs Catie and Ella deploy one of the floats
The float is lowered carefully into the water
A successful float deployment