Photo of the Week: Nighttime Operations

Aboard research vessel Sikuliaq, physical oceanographer Uwe Send's team works with one of the moorings of the California Current Ecosystem Moorings project off the coast of Southern California earlier this month. Photo by Uwe Send.

The moorings project was started in 2008 by Send and Mark Ohman at Scripps Oceanography and is making observations for research of ocean circulation, ocean acidification, fisheries, and interactions between the physical environment and the ecosystem. Most of the data from these moorings are telemetered in real-time.

In the photo, two buoys have been recovered and two are yet to be deployed as part of routine annual maintenance. At the deepest site, these moorings make measurements from the atmosphere down to near the seafloor at 4,000 meters (2.5 miles) deep.

The project is made possible with funding from the NOAA Ocean Acidification Program and the NOAA OOMD (Ocean Obs and Monitoring Div), as well as funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the CCE-LTER program, and leverages contributions from NOAA SWFSC and NOAA PMEL.

R/V Sikuliaq is owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as part of the U.S. academic research fleet.

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