L'ATALANTE 2008
Ship: L'ATALANTE Harbors: Mindelo - Mindelo
Dates: 23.02.2008 - 15.03.2008 Chief Scientist (s): Prof. P. Brandt
Research interest: Moorings and 23°W section.
Description: R/V Atalante cruise in Feb./Mar. 2008 (Figure 1) was aimed to study equatorial circulation and particularly the supply routes toward the equatorial upwelling region in the eastern Atlantic. During the cruise a mooring array at the equator at 23°W (Figure 2) was be recovered and redeployed.
Figure 1: Ship track of R/V l'Atalante cruise (leg4) from 23 Feb. to 15 Mar. 2008 (red line). Stars mark locations of mooring deployments, circles locations of mooring recoveries and dots CTD-O2 stations. Glider recovery and deep deployment position is shown as blue diamond.
Figure 2: Mean zonal velocity at the equator, 23°W together with the current meter mooring array that was deployed in Feb./Mar. 2008. The Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC) represents the main supply path of thermocline water toward theupwelling in the eastern equatorial Atlantic.
The study of the equatorial circulation is part of the BMBF project "Nordatlantik".
The cruise was also aimed to study the variability within the North Atlantic oxygen minimum zone in the frame of the DFG Sonderforschungsbereich 754. Here we want to study the spatial and temporal variability of the oxygen minimum zone. Oxygen measurements are performed using moored, shipboard and glider observations (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Oxygen distribution measured during RV Meteor cruise 68/2 along 23°W together with the instrumentation applied to observe spatial and temporal variability in the oxygen minimum zone. This includes subsurface moorings with profiling CTD-O2 probes, oxygen data logger attached to PIRATA surface buoys and glider observations (red dashed line).
