Preparing for the future

Peggy's Cove Lighthouse south of Halifax

Friday 11 to 16 May 

David Hydes travelled out to Halifax in Canada to work with Doug Wallace’s group in the Oceanography Department at Dalhousie University. The task is to assess the performance of the SNOMS tank under-laboratory conditions, and the performance of old and new designs of sensors. The Wallace group are keen to develop the SNOMS flow through tank concept for use on three new routes working with merchant ships in the North Atlantic, starting later this year. Daniela Turk is leading the work in Doug's Halifax group.

The tests are being carried out in the University’s Aquatron facility (http://aquatron.dal.ca/) a world leading laboratory space with extensive wet laboratories for carrying out testing and experiments with large volumes of seawater pumped directly from the sea.

Working with the Aquatron engineering team a laboratory space was converted for the experiments which will run for the next few months. This will enable the relative accuracy and precision of the instruments to be assessed over the kind of time scales they will deployed on ships or data buoys.

New instruments will be tested from ProOceanus (http://www.pro-oceanus.com/), Satalantic (http://www.satlantic.com/ph-sensors) and RBR (http://www.rbr-global.com/products) along with the ProOceanus and Aanderaa units (www.aadi.no/) already used in the SNOMS system.

 Monday morning a 2 cubic metre Aquatron tank is ready for service

 The SNOMS tank in its new surroundings - Wednesday afternoon

Equilibrator working in the top of the tank

New Satlantic SeaFET-pH  and  
ProOceanus CO2Pro-CV units in the tank
Further ProOceanus and RBR sensors will be added over the next two weeks

Tim, Chris and Daniela after their successful work getting all the sensors running

Our first water sample safely collected

Daniela with Jim - leader of the Aquatron Engineering team.
Many thanks are due to Jim and his team Steve, Lee and Craig for getting everything set up so quickly and efficiently in the lab.

Some thing extra.
The ACL ship the Atlantic Companion docked in Halifax on Tuesday.
She carries the Kiel CO2 system which now includes a cavity ring down detector

 Student Mija with the Kiel General Oceanics based system. Mija had done extra waters sampling on the crossing from Liverpool

Final Jobs In Melbourne

The above map shows the paths the Pacific Celebes took as she traded in the Pacific and 2011 and 2012.

The Pacific Celebes arrived in Melbourne Australia for the last time on 24 March 2012, before heading to breakers yard in China. The ship was met by Jon Campbell and Mark Hartman from NOC. While they were waiting for the Celebes to arrive, they were able to visit Helen Beggs and Ruslan Verein at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in Melbourne. This was to arrange the transfer of sea surface temperature to the Bureau. 

Once on board they worked  to remove the equipment from the ship, helped by the ships crew. 

 Above Mark starts the job of removing the data logger. Below the crew can been seen helping maneuver the SNOMS tank so it could be winched out of the engine room space.

As a heartfelt thank you to the crew Mark and Jon presented the Master Cai and Chief Engineer Lin Jin with NOC paper weights.

And all the crew with the NOC T-shirts they are modelling in the photo below.

The last thing was to check the packing of the equipment - the boxes of sampling to go to Southampton.

And the SNOMS tank and instruments to go to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The SNOMS system was shipped to University of Dalhousie, Halifax, Canada where over the next few months it will be used in tests that will help develop a second generation of flow tank based systems for observing the carbon dioxide system in the surface ocean. Doug. Wallace’s team at Dalhousie has plans for fitting SNOMS inspired tank based systems on two or three routes working in the North Atlantic. Testing will be done at the Dalhousie’s large facility the Aquatron Laboratory (http://aquatron.dal.ca/). The NOC SNOMS team are now (April 2012) designing experiments with the team at Dalhousie for testing the SNOMS system. David Hydes will travel to Halifax (12 May) to work on the start up of the actual tests. New sensors from two firms in Halifax, will be tested. These will be from ProOceanus who have provided our present core measuring device and Satlantic who have a promising device for directly measuring the pH of seawater. This will be to the high accuracy and precision needed for the assessment of ocean acidification.

Retirement of the Pacific Celebes

Early Wednesday Jon Campbell and Mark Hartman were heading towards Heathrow and then onto Melbourne Australia - their job being to decommission the SNOMS system on the Pacific Celebes. The Celebes, which has been such an excellent platform for the work of the SNOMS project has one more port call in Brisbane before she heads for a breakers yard in China. 

More details of our farewell to follow.

The SNOMS system will be shipped to Dalhousie University in Canada, where we will carry out tests on the system comparing the present senor performance with new ones from ProOceanus and Satlantic. The tests will be based at Dal's Aquatron Laboratories (www.aquatron.dal.ca).

Something different

Recently we were contacted through the SNOMS web pages by Gary Harbottle an Australian car fan who was desperate to know when his ’57 Chevy would be arriving in Melbourne. The pictures above and below show his Chevy waiting to go on board the Celebes when she was in LA. 

Gary’s car was following on from other interesting cargo she has carried during a career that has included steam railway engines and luxury yachts. This brings to mind the Celebes own engine, a wonderful four cylinder that has throbbed at a pace to make any Harley Davison enthusiast envious, turning her screw at 72 rpm. The picture below shows work being done on the cylinder heads.

Scenes from work in Vancouver October 2011

Jon and Zongpei serviced the SNOMS system during a busy day on 28 October.  The ProCO2 units had to be checked after removal from the tank and before being put into the tank shown in the picture below.

The friendly crew on the Pacific Celebes have always been a great asset to the SNOMS project.
The samples they have collected need to be checked and prepared for sending back to the UK for analysis.

Zongpei to visit NOAA PMEL in Seattle

Zongpei will be presenting his work with ships of opportunity at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco in December. He will then visit Richard Feely at NOAA to work on comparison of the SNOMS data with that collected by NOAA along a very similar route since 2004. The NOAA data are collected less frequently
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Long+Beach+to+New+Zealand. After a gap of two years NOAA started work again using the Hamburg Sud Natalie Schulte in
September 2010. One target of work in the Pacific is to use the ship of opportunity data in providing regularly updated basin wide estimates of CO2 fluxes.

Zongpei Jiang is a PhD student at NOC-University of Southampton. He is funded by the Swire Educational Trust (2009 to 2013) and supervised by David Hydes and Toby Tyrrell at NOC and by Minhan Dai at the University of Xiamen.

Work with the east coast as well

David Hydes is currently passing on the knowledge gained using the SNOMS flow through tank to Doug Wallace at the University of Dalhousie and Cyril Dempsey of Satlantic. Dalhousie and Satlantic are based in Halifax, Nova Scotia along with Bruce Johnson's company ProOceanus who make the CO2Pro and GTD units used in the SNOMS system.