The Great Voyage!

On Tuesday six of us (including me) went out on the boat to do temperature, depth, salinity, density and dissolved oxygen readings starting from the head of the mouth of the bay. To obtain these values we use a CTD and a YSI. I was in charge of using the CTD.

This is a picture of me about to deploy the CTD. What I had to do was to lower the CTD till that white tube was submerged and then hold it there for 30 seconds while the machine warmed up and started pumping water through the sensors. After it was ready I slowly lowered  the CTD into the water and as I did that it measured the needed data four times every second as it descended to the bottom. Once it hit the bottom I retrieved the CTD and shut it down, the data being saved in its internal memory. We then went back to the lab and used this data to construct a vertical and horizontal water stratification gradient from the mouth of the river to the head of the river. 

The data that we got from this allowed us to see general trends in the water as it flowed out to the ocean. As the water neared the ocean it went up in salinity and temperature while going down in dissolved oxygen. This data showed me how important currents are the the organisms that require specific conditions to survive. depending on what the weather has been and the area of the bay some places have much higher levels of production then others. This was a new concept to me that I thoroughly enjoyed learning about.