Ship Time for Navy Projects - R/V Pelican 2015
Abstract
PROJECT SUMMARY This proposal requests ship operation funds for 23 Navy funded research days aboard the R/V Pelican for calendar year 2015. There are currently 218 total days scheduled for 2015. The vessel was at sea for 199 days in 2014 and has averaged 248 days at sea over the last 10 years. The R/V Pelican was designed and outfitted to conduct a variety of oceanographic research missions. The reliability, utility and seaworthiness of this vessel have been well demonstrated. The R/V Pelican successfully conducts scientific trawling, large box core sampling, thirty-foot piston cores, shallow seismic surveys, current meter array and benthic boundary array deployment and recovery. The R/V Pelican has also successfully conducted plankton sampling, hydrographic casts with CTD-rosette system and underway sampling with towed water sampling systems. The R/V Pelican is operated as an Oceanographic Research Vessel as designated by the United States Coast Guard and is maintained as an American Bureau of Shipping (ABS) vessel. The Consortium is a member UNOLS and the R/V Pelican is a designated UNOLS vessel. The vessel is available for legitimate research and education programs of Consortium members, state and federal agencies, other nonprofit groups, and oceanographic industries. The Navy funded projects for 2015 onboard R/V Pelican are: Naval Research Laboratory: “Carbon Fixation Pathways From The Deep Marine Biosphere” Leila J. Hamden (NRL-DC); one cruise of 7 days. This work will consist of a single multi-coring and CTD cruise in the northern Gulf of Mexico. Sediment samples will be collected from a safe working distance from wooden and metal shipwrecks. Sediments will be used it isolate, culture and identify microorganisms from the dark biosphere which contain novel and enhanced pathways for dark carbon fixation. “Buoyancy Plume Modulation of Coastal Air-Sea Exchange Processes” Jason Jolliff (NRL-SSC); one cruise of 16 days. The Louisiana-Texas shelf, site of significant freshwater effluent, intense seasonal thermal stratification, and one of the world’s largest hypoxia zones, provides an ideal study site. We will leverage an existing coastal meteorological platform location (LSU-CSI station 06) with mooring sites consisting of high spatial (0.5 m vertical) and temporal (< hourly) resolution temperature-conductivity sensors (MicroCAT’s) that will measure the upper ocean density structure and diurnally-resolved thermal variability. Collocated and mooring-bound high-frequency Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers (ADCP s with wave/tide package) will provide a simultaneous high-resolution record of the current velocity profile in response to the recorded wind stress forcing. The central mooring will be located next to the CSI meteorological platform and in the midst of an array of similar such meteorological recording sites, whereas the remaining moorings will be configured around the site to account for tidal displacement and the horizontal covariance scales. The central mooring will also be configured with the BioSonic Echosounder instrument; this provides a simultaneous record of mechanical mixing from breaking waves at the air-sea interface. We also propose to use the Vertical Microstructure Profiler (VMP) to measure vertical eddy diffusivities in the critical areas near-surface and at the buoyancy plume / oceanic water mass interface. Field work will consist of mooring deployments, glider deployments, and repeated transects using the SanFish towed platform.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 12, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141512135
Entities
People
- Joseph Diddier Malbrough
Organizations
- Louisiana State University System
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy