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