[Exports_project_office] EXPORTS Survey Updates (passports!)

[Norm Nelson]

Hi Survey team, 

Just as a clarification because this came up again this week - although we have no plans to touch at any Canadian port we may pass through Canadian national waters and will pass through their EEZ on our way to international waters so we must bring our passports on this cruise. Chances are they won’t get looked at by any authorities but this is what we do. I think this has been made clear from the beginning but there have been a lot of changes to the team since the workshop so it came up again. Please bring your passport. Contact us now if this is a problem. 

Also we would like to ask everyone to plan on participating in a shakedown station on the transit out to Station P. I’d like this to happen a couple days before we arrive on station, at the time we will ordinarily allocate for a late-morning/noonish optics cast. We would like to take this opportunity to test out, with no pressure, our IOP, C-OPS, and ctd deployment procedures, instruments on the ctd, rosette sampling, R2R logging, etc., and the Hydro team would like to shake down their sample preparation procedures.  If your group is collecting samples on rosette casts we’d like you to at least walk through the motions of doing your sampling and sample prep so you can be sure everything is working smoothly. For the moment we are planning on this being an Optics+Th cast because of the timing, but we will do a custom sampling scheme for this one cast to accomodate sample types not found on this type of cast. In terms of sampling and collecting data this is of course an optional station (unless the skies are clear, then it will be a money station for optics data ;) but we’d like to have everyone pay attention here to help things go smoothly as we begin work in the EXPORTS study area. We will send out more updates on this as the schedule clarifies. Let us know if you have comments or questions. 

Also, there have been some developments concerning the autonomous assets which impact our work on the first epoch. In case you haven’t heard, there have been some software issues on the Bio-Argo floats (which have been resolved) meaning they couldn’t go on the OOI cruise, and today we’ve learned the Lagrangian float is also having some trouble and will not be deployed on OOI. As a result we will begin our first epoch with deployment of the floats and possibly a glider. So most of Day 1, Epoch 1 will be deploying floats and doing initialization casts (some deep casts where we will remove the <1000m instruments). Again, more on this as the situation develops. 

That’s all for now. We will have more updates as the time gets close - in particular we’d like to have a plausible Epoch 1 schedule for you all to look at and think about. 
Cheers, 
Norm and Mary Jane

Norm Nelson
Earth Research Institute
MC 3060
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
norm at eri.ucsb.edu
Vox: +1-805-893-3202