The following galleries illustrate some logistics and operations of our two projects with NOAA: "TAO", along the equatorial region of the Pacific Ocean and "PORTS" in Tampa Bay, FL. Click on any thumbnail to browse the gallery. You can use the left and right arrow buttons on your keypad to move forward and backwards through the galleries. Click on any of the expanded images, or hit the escape key to be taken back to this page.
RDSEA recently returned from a very successful research cruise in the Indian Ocean as part of the RAMA Program (Indian Ocean Observing System: “IndOOS”), a sub-component of the Global Moored Tropical Buoy Array which also consists of TAO in the Pacific and PIRATA in the Atlantic.. RDSEA's President Rick Cole joined researchers from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) of NOAA (Seattle, WA) along with scientists and students from Indonesia on a RAMA leg aboard research vessel Baruna Jaya III (BJ3). BJ3 departed Cilegon in west Java in mid-April and returned to Banda Aceh in western Sumatra (ground zero for the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia) three weeks later after turning around ocean climate monitoring systems in the eastern array, and deploying drift buoys and ARGO floats along the cruise track.
ARGO is an observation system for the Earth's oceans that provides real-time data for use in climate, weather, oceanographic and fisheries research. ARGO consists of a large collection of small, drifting oceanic robotic probes deployed worldwide. The probes float as deep as 2 km. Once every 10 days, the probes surface, measuring conductivity and temperature profiles to the surface. From these, salinity and density can be calculated. These data are transmitted to scientists on shore via satellite. The data collected are freely available to everyone, without restrictions. The initial project goal was to deploy 3,000 probes, completed in November 2007.
