Everything must come to an end… even an intrusion that comes onto the shelf and travels northward into fresher shelf waters. In order to estimate how the intrusions spreads, it is very important to sample the whole nose with high resolution.
This morning AUV Edgar found a nose. That means it’s time for our high-resolution instrument: The Vertical Microstructure Profiler (VMP). The delicate probes at the end of the 5ft-long instrument are smaller than a millimeter and measure over 500-times per second. This allows to estimate turbulence and mixing which could bring up nutrients further to the surface. When passing the nose, we saw a ton of jellyfish. Squids haven’t made it onto our AUV cameras, yet.
tl;dr: The VMP – today’s MVP!
