Last week R/V Sally Ride returned to San Diego after months away. But that doesn’t mean that the ship or her crew got much of a break. Within 72 hours, they were underway again. The summer CalCOFI research cruise will spend 17 days at sea, occupying 75 science stations to collect data as part of its historic data set. First up, … Read More
Mooring Work in the Gulf of Alaska
R/V Sally Ride is back out at sea after months of upgrades in the shipyard. This first research cruise has scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Oregon State University working on site at an array of moorings in the Gulf of Alaska to recover and deploy anchored strings of oceanographic instrumentation. Station Papa has been a community study site for … Read More
Photos from the Collaboration with Sproul and FLIP
The collaboration between research vessels Sally Ride and Sproul and research platform FLIP, all members of the Scripps fleet, wraps up in the next week. The three vehicles will return to port having run ~ 25 Remus missions, deployed and recovered wave buoys ~10 times, and completed many more operations with unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). Wave gliders and the moored … Read More
Working with R/V Sproul
R/V Sally Ride is out at sea studying surface waves and currents as part of a collaboration between scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Washington (UW). Other members of the Scripps fleet are in on the action as well, with R/V Sproul and R/P FLIP operating in the same area. Dr. Jim Thomson of UW, one … Read More
AUVs Studying Waves and Currents
As you may recall, Dr. Eric Terrill’s group was onboard in December to test drones and a remote-controlled kayak for scientific purposes. They’re back aboard R/V Sally Ride, this time with a different set of autonomous vehicles. They have multiple instruments for measuring the air-sea interaction that occurs at the surface of the ocean and upper water column from the … Read More
Report from the FLIP
**Guest blogger Randy Christian is a crew member on R/V Sally Ride, but this month is working on FLIP, Scripps’ FLoating Instrument Platform. FLIP is deployed on a project offshore of Southern California, accompanied by other members of the SIO fleet, R/V Sproul and R/V Sally Ride. You can learn more about Randy in this blog post introducing him as second mate, though … Read More
Trace Metals
R/V Sally Ride has its first bubble! It consists of a fort of plastic sheeting with filtered air fed in through a flow hood to create positive pressure (see header photo). Dr. Kathy Barbeau and her graduate students set it up in the wet lab in order to keep their work area clean of contamination. Their experiments focus on such … Read More
Zooglider Science
Leg 3 of this R/V Sally Ride cruise is underway after switching out the science party in Oceanside. Samples are being collected by a few different groups, including Scripps professor Mark Ohman and undergraduate and graduate students from his lab. We are operating in the vicinity of a zooglider that was launched recently from a small boat. The glider is an unmanned vehicle that carries … Read More
Ground-Truthing
Onboard R/V Sally Ride, and in oceanography in general, a lot of sensors are used to collect information. In order to check that inferences made are backed up with data, ground-truthing is required. On leg 1 of the current cruise, scientists used passive and active acoustic sensors to determine the density of animal populations. There are sensors attached to the bottom of … Read More
Buoys in the California Current
Dr. Uwe Send’s lab group at Scripps Institution of Oceanography consists of grad students, scientists, technicians, and engineers that fabricate, maintain, deploy, and recover instruments all over the world. This week they’re on R/V Sally Ride recovering a mooring, and deploying a new one in its place. This one is attached to a surface buoy, unlike the other mooring operations done on the … Read More