Scientist at Work Blog: Dropping Anchor at Station P

Jim Thomson is principal oceanographer at the Applied Physics Lab at the University of Washington. He studies ocean surface waves and coastal processes.

Thursday, Oct. 4
50 degrees north latitude, 145 degrees west longitude

Today, we arrived at Station P (Papa), one of the oldest ocean measurement sites in the world.

In 1943, the Navy established an ocean weather station here as part of the war effort. The station was overseen by the Coast Guard cutter Haida and other United States weather ships until 1951, when funds ran out and Canadian vessels took over.

In 1981, Canada cut funding to its weather ship program. That marked the end of continuous manned observations at Station P, but that?s also when the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences began regular research cruises to the site.

In 2007, autonomous observations were added with the deployment of a mooring from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The mooring and the research cruises continue today as a United States-Canadian partnership.

Since 2010, there has been another mooring at Station P ? our Waverider. That?s the mooring we came to recover and to replace. These are the first wave measurements at Station P, other than the visual observations from the weather ships. These measurements explore the connection of waves to wind, and they help calibrate wave forecast models.

We arrived at Station P a few hours before dawn and went to work on the deck deploying the replacement mooring. The weather was cooperating, and curiosity about the old mooring (the one without a single satellite transmission in the last two weeks) would have to wait.

We strung the new mooring out behind the ship, towing it at a speed of one to two knots, until the entire mooring, four kilometers (two and a half miles) long, was stretched out on the surface behind us. Then we dropped the anchor. Despite its 3,000 pounds, it takes about 20 minutes for the anchor to reach the bottom. The Waverider buoy itself stays on the surface and gets pulled into position.

With the deck clear and the new mooring out, we could finally go look for the old mooring. We went to the downwind side of its regular watch circle, and the captain spotted it in minutes. I think I owe him a beer ? but not until we?re back in San Diego (United States research ships are strictly dry boats).

We recovered the old mooring, including all of the line. It looked like the ocean elements, or at least the barnacles, were starting to get the better of it. Still, when we cracked the hatch, it was bone-dry inside, and the memory card full of data was right there waiting for us.

While doing all the mooring work, we let a couple Swift buoys drift and measure the whitecaps around us. An opportunity to get extra data at a place like Station P is not to be missed.

In fact, we added in a few other things, like collecting water samples from 4,000 meters down (more than 13,000 feet) for Mike Dodd, a colleague at University of Washington who studies the photoreactivity of water, and depth soundings around areas for possible future mooring deployments.

It was a great day at Ocean Station P.

Now we can look forward to another two years of wave data from the site. Much of what we learn probably will be similar to the knowledge gained in the previous two years. Certainly, the laws of physics don?t change. The climate and the winds that go with it, however, are changing every year.

With this data, we can begin to understand how the waves respond and participate in the coupled air-ocean system. Long data records are essential to understanding complex natural systems. The problem is, these data records get longer only one year at a time.

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This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 12, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the federal body that focuses on weather and ocean conditions. It is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, not the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association.

Source: http://scientistatwork.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/dropping-anchor-at-station-p/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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