Being part of the NASA S-MODE oceanographic mission was a great experience for me. It was only my second oceanographic mission and my first one on a US research vessel. I learned a lot about how to use the different instruments, interpret their data and about the complexity of the ocean.
This mission is designed to study submesoscale fronts – which correspond to abrupt changes of water temperature or salinity over scales of about 6 miles or 10 kilometers in the ocean. They act in a similar way as we have fronts in the atmosphere that bring us cold or warm weather, rain or dry air masses. S-MODE is making the first observations that show such fronts do play a role in stabilizing our climate by acting as a connector between the deep ocean and the atmosphere and controlling the exchanges of quantities such as heat or carbon.
