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1. Graffiti artists

2. Argo deployment

From: Gerard McCarthy
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 08:28
Subject: Update

Our cruise is well under way at this stage with almost two thirds of the CTD stations finished. Geographically, we are about halfway between South America and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Most of our work has been doing CTD stations, as Ben has reported earlier. We also have deployed Argo floats and a weather buoy. I was particularly interested in the Argo deployments as a lot of my PhD is based on working with the data they provide. We have deployed six of these floats on this cruise.

There are over three thousand Argo floats spread through the world's oceans. They provide measurements of temperature, salinity and pressure down to depths of 2000 metres. Every ten days they broadcast their data via satellite to the Argo programme, and from their database oceanographers can access it. The floats provide a better coverage of the global ocean than we could hope to cover with scientific cruises. It is remarkable how they do all this given their size: each is only about 2 metres long and weighs only 25 kg.

Gerard