Home!

Mission Day 156.  Honey Badger is home.  It was a tough slog at the end.  The LRI Team Honey Badger had take a too small boat over to the windward side to pick Honey Badger up.  Between the fouling and a twist in the tether, it just could not defeat the currents in the Alenuihaha Channel.  However, it now back in its cradle and giving up its secrets. 

Much to my astonishment, the LISST-Holo performed flawlessly and delivered over 9,000 images.  I've spent the past day downloading and copying them to multiple back ups. The system is not undamaged, but did not leak. It  was not eaten by a tiger shark. So, all in all, a good deployment.

The image from the down looking camera showed lots of fish along the way.  There are also some good images containing Rhizosolenia mat and what appears to be a massive aggregation event. More as that story unfolds. 

-Tracy 

Time for this one to go home

Mission day 103.  Honey Badger has been taking some hits. It's got a twisted umbilical, some goofy data from one of the sensors,  something may be living in the Phytoflash chamber, it's been through 3 storms, and one of the redundant GPS sensors (kind of important for getting home) may be problematic.   Cara, Danny Merritt (our mission coordinator) and myself considered all the omens and decided that it's time for Honey Badger to start the trip home.  

It will take a while since we are something on the order of 600 nautical miles north of Hawaii and there is plenty of good science left to do.   We are currently in a small bloom and as soon as we reach the next waypoint (about 25 nautical miles), Honey Badger will take a sharp right for the journey home. 

Ignacio

Honey Badger is brushing with Ignacio today and the conditions look rough.   There are 20-24 foot waves, winds blowing at 35+ knots.  It's  good day to be somewhere else.  Here's the wind field from a NOAA model captured on windyty.com. It's pretty impressive and also shows another storm sneaking up from the south. Honey Badger is at the pointy base of the teardrop

The surface currents are pushing us north and combined with the wave-propulsion, Honey Badger is making about 2 knots speed over ground. That doesn't sound like much, last week we were becalmed and barely making 0.1 kts SOG.  Big difference!

All three fluorometers are showing an increase in fluorescence. The Fo from the phytoflash is shown here:

The spiking is interesting to think about. There are few studies of how oceanic phytoplankton react to the passage of cyclones of this size. For obvious reasons, it's hard to be in the right place at the right time. One study in the Pacific during  a large wind event  noted a post-storm increase  primary production, biomass and in the material sinking out of the euphotic zone by larger size fraction material.  The LISST-Holo data will have such size fraction information (assuming it is working and gets home),  and should be a pretty unique data set on the biological response at the surface.  In a perfect world, we could clone Honey Badger and send it back into the wake of the storm, but that's a week or more in the wrong direction.  Since we have not yet sampled an active bloom, we will have to stay on-mission and avoid such distractions (but it would be sooo much fun...).

The Big Fizzle

Day 95 and Honey Badger is still plugging away.  Poseidon is laughing at us.  The bloom fizzled out and disappeared the day before we got there. There are some remants of it around, but as we proceed north, the water is getting lower in chl fluorescence as well as having much less frequent spiking.  Satellite imagery from 8/29/15 shows the big blooms are up north, so we have been heading that way for the past few days.  It was very painful slog for the first few days since we had a significant current on the bow and at one point, we were making 0.1 kts speed over ground (that's not very fast).   A course change to the north along with some higher waves has our speed up to 1 kt SOG.  Much better! 

We will be at the next waypoint in about 48 hours, but we will probably change course before then to head towards the blooms.  The currents around the mesoscale features in the area are a significant fraction of Honey Badger's speed, so we are having to carefully monitor the sea surface height and current offset in Honey Badger's path to try and determine the best route.    It reminds me of my sailboat racing days off Newport as a graduate student .  Pay attention to the currents or you wind up looking at everybody's transom. 

Finally, a bloom

As we move into Honey Badger's 76th mission day, we are finally seeing many signs that a series of large blooms is underway. Through a curious luck, we are pretty much equidistant from all of them.  However, Honey Badger is plugging away and should be at a pretty big one in about 3-4 day, just on the other side of waypoint 58. 

3 day imagery of Honey Badger (purple) and the next waypoint (58). The bright red are the chlorophyll blooms we are trying to sample.

We've already started to see signs that we passed through a region of elevated activity.  The chlorophyll fluorescence was increasing on all 3 fluorometers as well as the phycoerythrin.  The photoysynthetic yield is increasing too, suggesting we are entering a region where the phytoplankton are not as limited as they were in the past few day.

Plot of the Fv:Fm parameter over the past 7 days. The line at 0.5 is just for reference. It's pretty clear there's been an increase in the past few days. 

The phytoflash went walkabout yesterday, so we missed some sampling last night local time. It should be fun to watch what happens over the next few days.  The noise in the raw data is getting quite pronounced.  An optimist would say that that we are finding a lot of aggregates and such.  A less rosy view is that the fouling is getting worse and worse.  However,  we are working at the lower edge of the phytoflash's design parameters, so this may just be par for the course.  The running average is giving us a nice trend, so the data is quite credible regardless of the cause.

It's dark!

Tropical Storm Guillermo didn't really kick up the seas for us, but it was really cloudy. We've had to turn off a few sensors to keep the power from being drained.   It's not a crisis, but we are temporarily without one of the C3 fluorometers.  Otherwise, all seems well. We are heading toward a big patch of chlorophyll off to the west.  It is near the area we crossed heading north in June.  Before then, we will cross a region of very low chlorophyll and should have a chance to see if the spiking in the sensors all dies down. That would be a great result since it would give us some confidence that fouling was not causing all this. 

-Tracy

Tropical storm!

Tropical storm Guillermo will be passing between Honey Badger and Hawaii over the next few days. The meteorology and wave reports will be quite fun to watch. Stay tuned!

-Tracy

data

Honey Badger is in its 61st mission day.  All is going pretty well.  The only issues that have come up are apparently linked to the software/computer interface with the systems.  When we average the data from Turner C3 that we can program on the fly, something in the glider's system is dividing by 2 (approximately).  We had this system (ID 32 on the data tab) running on single point measurements every 10 minutes for most of the mission.  However, we started taking 10 points at 1 Hz every 10 minutes and averaging them a few days ago to compare to the C3 (ID 3).  It is hardwired at this rate.  The reason for this is that starting around 10 June 2015, we started seeing extensive spiking in the C3-3.  We expected this and were interpreting the signal as phytoplankton aggregations or some other large organism with a chl signal (colonial radiolarians, for example).  The other C3 (32) was set on single point measurements and was giving us a different level of spiking. So, we decided to put them on the same frequency to see if they reported the same. This would eliminate fouling as a problem.
 

Turner C3-3 from the Honey Badger

Since starting this, they are looking the same. However, we have not found a low spiking area yet to confirm that the signal reduces simultaneously.  The data is in ERDDAP, so anyone can go replot this if they want to see more details (click on the window in that data page, it will take you to the server page).

This is all very good news.  We are excited by the geographic extent of this spiking.  A report by Karl et al (PNAS) indicated that a massive pulse of phytoplankton (probably symbiotic diatom/cyanobacteria)  occurs predictably at this time of year, and they are probably aggregated.  If this is what we are seeing, then this must be much larger than just of HOT (Hawai'i Ocean Time series station north of Oahu).  The thumbs of the camera pictures (looks downward from the bottom of the float) are not sufficient resolve anything unfortunately. The images are on the Honey Badger's computer awaiting it's (hopefully) triumphant return to Hawai'i.   The imaging system on the Sequioa LISST-Holo (holograms) should be capturing  detailed species data as well.  Again, we have to wait until Honey Badger returns  to extract it. Emily Anderson, the M.S. working on this, will have a LOT of images to look at. 

In the meantime, we are getting real-time physiological data on the phytoplankton from the Turner Phytoflash.  In between coffee breaks and dreamtime, it is recording data on two levels of fluorescence returned from different light flashes.  A manipulation of this data produces something we call Fv:Fm (technically variable fluorescence/maximum fluorescence).  The maximum value of this for this type of system is about 0.8 under perfect conditions (others max out at about 0.65 due to how this value is measured).  We are seeing consistent values at night of about 0.45. So, not in the best of shape, but there are number of factors likely reducing this number from its true value and we can try to correct for them.  However, the really interesting part is that we are seeing peaks at dawn and dusk that can be linked to nutrient limitation.  The dawn peaks seen in the figure below are what is predicted by a paper by M. Behernfeld et al (2006, Nature, doi:10.1038/nature05083).

These patterns indicated nitrogen limitation (red dots, 5 point running average).  If we find a bloom of the nitrogen-fixing symbioses we expect to, a reasonable expectation is that these patterns will shift to something else.  Iron limitation has a very distinctive signature in the Fm:Fv. It is not clear what other patterns look like (phosphorus or silicate), but we shall see what turns up.  The black dots are the Fm value (maximum fluorescence). It is akin to what the C3s are measuring and is the third chl fluorometer tracking spiking.  When plotted on the same scale, it shows much the same pattern as the C3s.  The oscillation seen in the data is the daily pattern.  High daytime solar radiation reduces the Fm and it rebounds at night.  This is the reason the Fm:Fv shows an oscillation as well. The daily fluorescence patterns are highly affected by daytime insolation.

This is all so cool.  I'm working at sea, and can go home tonight and make pizza.  Drink wine too, something a bit difficult to do on a UNOLS ship these days.  I attach an image of the most serious impediment to this type of work. 

Decisions, decisions

Honey Badger is currently 1070 km from home.  There have been a lot of clouds over the Honey Badger's area the past week, so it has been tough to figure out if the wispy blob of chlorophyll we set out to find was real or not.  However, the most recent one day imagery seems to show that there's nothing special there at the moment.  You can see way point 56 is in the middle of a nicely blue area, and all the interesting yellow-green (higher chl) is off to our west.  Honey Badger is  just at the eastern edge of the no data swath, heading east at 1.2 knots (practically a rooster tail).  Cara and I need to contemplate our options. 

1 day image 18 July 2015

Emily Anderson,  a new M.S. student in my lab, has arrived and is working on the data set.  We'll get her signed up to blog in the next week so she can keep us updated on what she's doing. 

The instruments are sending back good data, although the SMC computer and the phytoflash are not getting along very well.  The problem is likely in the software on the SMC running the phytflash.  It's a new configuration for the wave glider and our budget did not allow extensive testing of it.  Most of the time the phytoflash runs fine.   Periodically something in the system takes a time out from sampling (a coffee break, we call them) and returns in about an hour.  Sometimes it does not come back from the coffee break and goes into dreamtime.  I have to restart the system to get its attention and get the phytoflash running again. 

 Later this week, I"ll post some of the really interesting data we are seeing in the phytoflash.  It is showing the sorts of patterns reported by Mike Behrenfeld in one of his papers a few years ago, and it will allow us to make some interpretations about the types of nutrient limitations found in blooms.  Assuming we find one....

Lost and found

After a somewhat angst-filled morning, Danny, the wise project manager, noted that the tow cable is in plain view.  It is the line with the 4 marks, followed by the 5 bright spots. Those are the weights and floats on it.  I knew that.   So, the LISST-Holo is apparently still with us. 

On another note, the fish actually have names.  The 5 big ones are mahi-mahi and the two smaller blue ones (one has stripes) are pilot fish.  There is a bunch of fuzz on the left hand side of the image in front of the float. These could be small bait fish of some sort, or (more likely)  it could just be schmutz on the lens or camera port.   This is quite the collection.  Our own little Honey Badger ecosystem. 

Honey Badger made some friends...

This image was taken at 12:00 local time on July 1. The honey badger had just made an odd little loop de loop (centered at 28.15°N) which was probably related to some shear in the currents associated with the eddy we are heading into, but we took a look at the camera pics to make sure nothing was wrapped around the umbilical cord. What is worrying is that the holo tether isn't visible. Hopefully is it hidden behind the umbilical. We'll be looking at more pictures to try to confirm that it is still there.

Arrived at 29°N!

A few days ago HB arrived at 29°N, our target latitude since this is where the blooms develop. The glider got here in good time, and we’ve got a few weeks to go before the bloom season gets going as they start to develop in July. Their latitude is usually pretty consistent, but they longitude is more variable, they develop somewhere between 130°-150°W. That's over 1,000 km, which is a big distance to cover, especially for a wave glider moving at a little over a knot! Obviously we are hoping for blooms to develop closer to 150°W than 130°W. While we are waiting for a bloom to develop we are going to head due south, into the center of a little eddy that blew the HB off course on the way up north. The HB's position on June 25, and the new waypoint (the big star) are shown in the image below. However this change of course puts us going directly into the prevailing current, so it might be a little slow going.

New Data Viewing Feature

Lynn DeWitt, the website designer,  added a data tab to the MAGI website which shows the past 7 days of data for all the relevant data streams on Honey Badger, a master systems control page!  Very cool - thanks Lynn!

Week 1

Honey Badger has been on its own for a week now, sailing (steaming?  flapping?) its way north.  All the sensors are working pretty well. There is a bit of a puzzle with one of the C3 sensors that is reporting chlorophyll, CDOM (colored dissolved organic material) and phycoerythrin.   It is connected to a computer board that allows us to change the sampling and averaging.  For some, yet unknown reason, the values from a single measurement every 10 minutes are 2 times the value of the values when 10 samples are taken and averaged together.  This is the data feed on the webpage, and you can see the jump back and forth as we changed the sampling.  It's very odd.  Fortunately, we have a redundant C3 sensor as well as the phytoflash unit. This latter instrument is not on the webpage since the data is a bit complicated to use and not as obvious as to meaning as things like temperature, salinity and pigment.

When in Hawaii,  I was given a unique WaveGlider data stick. It's cool. 

I wish it had a working sub-body (the part with the flapping vanes) so that we could have races! 

 Next time, I will tell the story of the Honey Badger Naming Ceremony that happened in Monterey, CA. 

The mission has begun!

Honey Badger is off to the North Pacific!  We replaced the TBT anti-fouling device over-nighted from Seabird Electronics last night (Thank you, Seabird) on the deck of the boat this morning, activated the Vengmar acoustic listening instrument  provided by Barbara Block of Stanford (listens for tagged animals, probably mostly sharks if we happen by one), and checked on the plugs in the tow fish.  Everything went splendidly and now Honey Badger is heading off to  the northwest.

Track as of 17:54 Hawaii Standard Time.  This can be seen on the main project page.  Honey Badger is where the big green dot it. 

The TBT anti-fouling device.   Brad's pinky is holding it in place until it gets reassembled.

Me checking on the electronics plug.  I fretted about this all weekend. They were tight. 

 This is the final picture of Honey Badger before it sails off into the open Pacific.  Good luck!

another long weekend

The antifouling device showed up from Seabird, but much later than we expected. So, Honey Badger will not get a TBT facelift until Monday. Brad will do it on the boat, so we don't have to bring it (her? him?  ships are her, but AUVs?  No nautical lore to guide me here) back to the dock.  I requested a more adventurous track than just a box so we could look for gradients and test both the instruments and the website.  The delay is not a big deal, although everybody would have liked to send Honey Badger over the horizon today.  I'm not leaving until Tuesday, so we will have some final pictures of the glider to post. 

Here is the official farewell picture for Honey Badger. Many thanks to everybody here for helping out with this and not looking too annoyed when I got in the way.

And here's Honey Badger being loaded and a farewell to land for a long time:

Test deployment successful

Honey Badger spent a long memorial day weekend in the water off the Big Island.  We've got our data streams up and running, and the website can present graphs of data and position. We are very happy!  There are still a few things left to do. The towfish was not a happy camper and was quite negatively  buoyant.  Brad and I spent much of the day getting it reballasted and figuring out ways to rapidly vent trapped air.  The problem with the phyto-flash was fixed by the Keith in Sunnyvale (thanks!) and is working.  Brad is prepping Honey Badger for the long haul, touching up paint, and the like.  We had one 11th hour crisis when Brad asked "when was the anti-fouling device on the CTD replaced?"  My blank stare pretty much said it all.  We don't know.  So, after a hurried phone call to the vendor (Seabird Electronics), I got another set ordered and FEDEXed overnight to us for delivery on Friday.  Brad will swap them out on the boat in the test area.   Meanwhile, Honey Badger goes into the sea again tomorrow for the final ballast check of the towfish. We will let it tow 24 hours, test the remaining instrument's performance (the phyto-flash) and on Friday, Brad will install the new anti-fouling device at sea.  Then, Honey Badger is good to go!

We have not decided whether to hold station in the test area for the weekend, or just send Honey Badger off over the horizon.  A lot will depend on the ballasting situation.  Stay tuned.

Here's a youtube video of Honey Badger being unloaded from the support vessel:
http://youtu.be/bH5WhSC7py8

Brad checking the tow cable.

Derek touching up the paint on the towfish.  

Testing is underway

Honey Badger is out in the ops area, doing squares.  The instruments are generally performing well.  One of the fluorometers has a funky temperature sensor, but that's not a big deal since we will not be using those data anyway (the CTD is designed for this and the primary temperature source).  We will have to fix the phyto-flash when it gets back in.  We launched knowing it was not sending good data, but did not have the fix in hand before the weekend was upon us. So, rather than waste the time, we decided to set Honey Badger loose for the long weekend and implement the fix on Tuesday when we recover.

Here's an overview of what Honey Badger is doing at the moment.  It's just running a box in the test area off of the Big Island.

A close up shows the detail. It's reporting a CTD data set every 10 minutes and that is what these points are linking to. It is moving at an average speed of about 1 knot, so the points are not far apart.  Besides, it has been going over the sam box for about 2 days now, so the data is pretty dense!

Many thanks to Bob  Simons at NOAA for getting our data stream in order.  Cara and I are very grateful for his efforts as well as to Lynn Dewitt for putting together the website.  This is going to be so much fun!

Test launch

Honey Badger went into the ocean today at 14:37 Hawaii Standard Time (00:37 GMT).  All seems to be well although it is heavily laden and a bit low in the water.  Data is now flowing into the ERDDAP server, but we need to make sure all of it is there.  There are lots of details to work out but we are finally in the water!  Congrats to the entire team at LRI for making this happen.

Here's a track to date, posted at 17:02 HST. 

in Hawaii! First day of equipment checks

May 20, 2015

First full day of work here.  I (Tracy) stopped by yesterday and dropped off sampling bottles for them.  While they were out collecting water for me to filter as a Phyto-flash blank, Brad and Chuck  started on calibrating the C3s and I downloaded new software for the LISST-Holo.

There are some issues. We aren't seeing the C3s data uploads for some reason and the LISST-Holo is giving me errors linked to intermittent power failures. This is very odd since we have no evidence of power flickers in the building, but I guess it does not take much. I've moved the system to a different circuit panel altogether for the last run of the evening.

Some pictures of the day:

Honey Badger on display. The tank in the back is where the buoyancy testing for the tow fish was taking place
 

Brad doing a  buoyancy check on the towfish

 Chuck in the innards of the SV2 working on the C3 fluorometers

 Brad taking the LISST-Holo out of the towfish for the software upgrade

Field deployment is about to begin

I'm heading out to Hawaii on Monday to conduct a short field test and then the deployment for the summer's mission.  I  have to calibrate the pigment sensors and do a filtered water blank of the Phyto-flash. This is an important correction for this instrument and it has to be done at the last minute. 

After we launch on Friday, Honey Badger will have a 3 day weekend in the test area off of Kawaihae Harbor (northwest corner of the Big Island).  We will recover it, download the holographic data, and then the LRI team will conduct the final nuts and bolts prep for a multiple month mission.  

Right now, the area looks pretty empty: 

However, the bloom season doesn't really start until July, so we have plenty of time to get up to  30° N and wait.  The feature in the upper left of the image is the transition zone chlorophyll front. It will migrate north as the waters warm and will not be a factor in our sampling.  

More from Hawaii!

-Tracy

MAGI is back

We are back!  After  year's delay due to technical problems, Project MAGI is ready to begin field testing in Hawaii in late May.  Stay tuned.
--Tracy