July 6 - July 13, 2001 vol. 38 no. 27

Calendar

Tuesday, July 10

DOCTORAL DISSERTATION DEFENSE - Preston H. Holmes will defend his doctoral disseration entitled "The Afferent and Efferent Connections of the Telencephalon in the Senegal Bichir" in 4500 Hubbs Hall at 1 p.m. The public is invited.
(Tim Ryan, tryan@ucsd.edu)

Wednesday, July 11

PERSPECTIVES ON OCEAN SCIENCE - Wake up your senses with a hot cup of coffee and the hottest new research from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the aquarium's next Perspectives on Ocean Science breakfast lecture. Join us for a stimulating presentation by Dan Rudnick, "Fronts and Eddies: The Weather of the Ocean," 7:30-9:00 a.m. in the aquarium's Galleria. Just as there are fronts in the atmosphere, there are fronts in the ocean. Ocean fronts separate regions of warm and cool water, as well as salt and fresh water, and are often sites of strong biological productivity. Dan will discuss what his observations teach us about the weather of the ocean and share the tools used to observe fronts and eddies in the ocean. Please RSVP to 534-7336. Includes continental breakfast, parking validation and aquarium admission for the day. Aquarium Members: Free; UCSD/Scripps staff, faculty, students: $5; Guests: $8.

JOINT SEMINAR - The Scripps Research Institute and The NASA Specialized Center of Research and Training (NSCORT)/UCSD invite you to a seminar given by Michael Famulok, University of Bonn, Germany, who will present "RNA-Intramers as Inhibitors of Cytoplasmic Proteins." Farmulok will present this topic at 2 p.m. at the W. M. Keck Foundation Amphitheater Beckman Building located at The Scripps Research Institute. (Visitors may park in front of the building. Parking IS limited so carpooling is recommended. A map of the Scripps campus can be found at http://www.scripps.edu/intro/maps.html.

Notices

SEA GRANT RESEARCH ON THE WEB - California Sea Grant has begun posting web stories about its funded research. The first of these are about squid reproduction, artificial reefs, Caulerpa, and coastal erosion. See them at http://www-csgc.ucsd.edu/.

DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL JULY 17 - If you wish to be listed in the 2001 Research Activities book please return your information by this date. All academics who have not yet responded will receive reminder information this week. E-mail questions to ncriqui@ucsd.edu. If you do not respond, we will use the information currently on the Web site. To take a look at the Research Activities Web site go to http://www.sioadm.ucsd.edu/rab/.

SIO BEACH PICNIC - Calling all volunteers! The eagerly-anticipated SIO Beach Picnic will be held August 18. We need your help! Contact Jill Ives (jives@usd.edu,) or Karen Garst (kgarst@ucsd.edu). Appreciate it!

Ship News

R/V Revelle NECC Expedition - Greetings from the good ship Revelle, We are surveying the 3-dimensional velocity and density structure of the North Equatorial Countercurrent (NECC) from 105-85W in the eastern Pacific. We hope to better understand Harald Sverdrup's fundamental theory of wind driven ocean circulation, which he first used to show that an ocean current - the NECC - could flow against the prevailing winds. We arrived at our study region on 20 June, and have now been surveying the NECC for a week. We have deployed 32 mixed layer drifting buoys and made 5 velocity sections using a variety of doppler sonar transducers. We have also made 2 hydrographic sections of the current using a towed CTD package called "seasoar". So far we have found relatively shallow surface currents overlying a steady eastward core in the thermocline. We are presently steaming to 95W where we will survey for almost 3 weeks. The weather has been moderately wet and rough from transiting under the ITCZ and within the tradewinds. The ship is comfortable, everyone has their sealegs, and Ed is the best chef any of us have encountered at sea -nobody is losing weight on this trip!

Signing off,

Revelle Science Party:
S. Kennan (NSU), J. Sprintall and C. Martin (SIO-PORD), J. Calderwood, F. Delahoyde, and C. Mattson (SIO-ODF), G. Pillard (SIO-STS), F. Ascani (Univ. HI), E. Vasquez (Costa Rica Ministry)

Weekly Scientific Report R/V Melville, COOK Leg 9 - Greetings from
R/V Melville, Japan / East Sea, 02-July-2001 - Work is progressing very well, now 12 days into our cruise in the Japan Sea / East Sea. It's the rainy season here, giving overcast skies, but not bad winds-- so we won't complain. Two years ago URI and NRL (as part of ONR's JES Program) deployed from R/V Revelle an array of 25 Pressure recording Inverted Echo Sounders (PIES) plus 13 deep recording current meter moorings (RCM). These sites are coordinated with other moorings from Korea and Japan in an array designed to produce daily maps of the upper and deep currents and temperature structure in a region approximately 240 X 260 km in the southwestern Japan/East Sea. This research when combined with CREAMS (ongoing since 1993 by Japan, South Korea, and Russia) and with NRL's LINKS program (1999-2003) will substantially improve our understanding of the currents and water mass structure in the Japan / East Sea.
The basic tasks on this cruise are

** to take CTDs at each PIES for comparison purposes;
** to recover the 13 RCMs;
** to recover the 25 PIES.

Thus far we have taken 24 CTDs, recovered 21 PIES and 11 RCMs. (One addt'l PIES and one RCM mooring seem to be trapped to the bottom, possibly by crab fishing gear in this very heavily fished region. We will recheck them later, hoping they've wiggled free.) A new test instrument deployment was quite informative. Its simpler-to-tune echo detector worked very well, and the telemetry sending and reception scheme was successful. (easy to interpret, low error rate). We are conducting much data processing as the instruments come aboard-- a philosophy which promotes feedback between the scientists and technicians/engineers regarding instrument performance and requirements. The PIES data all appear to be excellent quality, except for one site for which the travel time data failed after about 5 months. Pressure exhibits an unexpected jump on three sites. The current meter data are all good except for one RCM that stopped recording after two days. The CTD data are high quality. Unexpected benefit: Many IES sites exhibit some early echoes, which we think are from fish having swim-bladders, rather than from zooplanckton scattering layers. We clearly see their daily vertical migration of 150-200m. Different sites show seasonal variation (increasing in spring-summer, which would correspond to bloom times), and interannual variation. It will be fun to try to see how this corresponds to satellite ocean-color imagery and to fisheries information. Our scientific party is working together very well -long hours without much break, because the stations are close together and our party size is small. Our Japanese and Korean colleagues aboard are helping greatly. We're hoping to finish work and return to Pusan a day early. I want to commend the captain, the chief engineer, and crew for a well run ship. Our ResTech, Shad Baiz, deserves special thanks for a great job, making sure we get good CTDs and successful safe mooring recoveries through long weird hours... and maintaining a cheery helpful attitude. Ron Moe was key to getting our several computers networked. Food is great too. Thanks much to all.

Cheers,

Randy Watts,
Chief ScientistCheers,
Randy Watts,
Chief Scientist

R/V Roger Revelle http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/Revelle/Revelle.html

R/V Melville http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/Melville/melville.html
will depart when load-out is complete

R/V New Horizon http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/NewHorizon/newhor.html

R/V Robert Gordon Sproul
http://www.sio.ucsd.edu/supp_groups/shipsked/RobertSproul/sproul.html

David Starr Jordan http://www.pmc.noaa.gov/schedule/ds.htm

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PLEASE NOTE - The SIO LOG is the in-house newsletter for staff,
students, faculty, and retirees of Scripps Institution of
Oceanography/ UCSD. All seminars, celebrations, lectures, and events
are for these individuals only, unless otherwise noted. Public
lectures will be advertised in the SIO LOG and in the local news
media.