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.