NOAA Teacher at Sea
Karolyn Braun
Onboard NOAA Ship Ka’imimoana
October 4 – 28, 2006
Mission: TAO Buoy Array Maintenance
Geographical Area: Hawaii
Date: October 9, 2006
Science and Technology Log
Plan for the day:
2:00 CTD 11N/155.5W
9:30 CTD 10N/155.5W
17:30 CTD 9N/155.5W
A beautiful morning: partly cloudy, calm waters and a wonderful 83 degrees. The day started out busy: laundry, breakfast, getting ready for the 9:30 a.m. CTD cast. After watching the CTD yesterday and going over the commands, I felt confident to cast the CTD; however, we conducted several practice runs before we actually cast the CTD. That definitely was reassuring as I was new, and so was the crane operator. The CTD was launched successfully—next stop 1000 meters. I helped set up the computers to fire the 24-containers at various depths, from 1000m to surface, and collect salinity, conductivity and temperature readings from the brain of the CTD. After the CTD reached the surface, we secured the CTD back on deck and proceeded to collect water for chlorophyll sampling.
As we were collecting the water, we had a man overboard drill. That was very unexpected but exciting to watch the crew of the ship work so well together. My afternoon was spent filling 20 five-gallon containers with seawater for use in a chemistry lab off island. Currently I have some down time before the next CTD in a few hours. I am going to work out in the gym for a bit and get my Styrofoam cups ready for the 4000m CTD cast.