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