station back online November 30th

The station came back online without intervention on Thursday, November 30th. There continue to be sporadic transmitter error counts reported but as of December 26th they are not appearing consistently so there is less cause for alarm.

The current working theory is still that these error counts relate to a problem obtaining a daily GPS fix. If that's true, then we should be able to go for roughly one month with consistently reported transmitter errors before we can expect the station to go offline again. As of December 26th we only have two consecutive days' worth of transmitter error reports so if the GPS theory is true, the station could go offline again no earlier than late January.

However, if the current patterns hold, the station could well remain online indefinitely.

-- Mike J+

Cleaning update

Cleaned station today.

Dave

station offline

The St. Croix station went offline after its last transmission on Sunday, November 19th at 22:22 UTC (6:22 PM local St. Croix time, 5:22 PM AOML time).

We are examining the data for hints about what may have gone wrong. At this stage the most promising hypothesis is a failure in the transmitter's GPS system.

Deep CTD swapped, capillary tubes removed

In a visit to the station on Tuesday, October 24th, Dave Ward removed the SRVI2-Deep CTD (s/n 1644), whose temperature sensor was malfunctioning, which was also affecting this CTD's salinity data.

The new SRVI2-Deep CTD is s/n 1608, and it appears to be working properly.

Dave Ward removed the capillary tubes from the SRVI2-Shallow CTD (s/n 1643) and from the SeaBird SBE-29 pressure sensor. It was hoped that this would fix the problems with the pressure readings from SRVI2-Shallow (which show a large drift in readings over time) but removing the capillary tubes has not fixed the SRVI2-Shallow problem. It appears as though we will have to replace SRVI2-Shallow as well.

The so-called "GroundTruth" CT remains a permanent fixture on this station while we work out the problems with the CTDs.

Station up and running

At last! The station has been installed and is broadcasting data.

An update will follow soon.

Jim Hendee

Stick is in the water!

The stick is in the water, sturdy, straight.  I think the heavy work is more or less done already.  It's still got plastic wrapped around the top but the light's been unwrapped.  It sounds like they've done some amazing work here already this week.

Tomorrow we go into Fredricksted to pick up the electronics from the red boxes.  I bring 'em back here for a few hours of handholding before they go out, and then tomorrow afternoon we'll start loading up the stick.

Well begun is half done!

cheers,
Mike J+

Biological Monitoring

As of 4 August, the corals in St. Croix looked great with no bleaching (not even the fire corals (Millepora spp.) or Palythoa were pale).  A few Montastraea faveolata were still a little pale, but Dave Ward told us that these still haven't recovered fully from last years bleaching event.

Ruben van Hooidonk and I did four 20 meter video transects directly under the stick site (transect lines were tied from opposite eye bolt to eye bolt across the base plate).  Everything looked great here.  Interestingly, there were a lot of coral recruits (small colonies that were < 2 yrs old or so).  Ruben and I also did three transects each at the east and west wall of the Salt River Canyon at 90 feet, 55 feet and 30 feet (six total).  These will act as reference sites to the coral under the stick and will provide great data in the event of bleaching.  Ruben is very interested in the effect that hurricanes may have across this depth distribution.

On the last day, Ruben and I tagged 68 colonies and took small cores for zooxanthellae studies.  One of Andrew Baker's students across the street, Adrienne Romanski, is going to analyze the DNA of the zooxs from these samples.  The idea is to sample the same corals over the next three years annually to see if the types of zooxanthellae change with time.  Some zooxs are more temperature tolerant than others, and researchers have found that corals can swap out for the hardier types during bleaching.  These questions are vital to understanding if corals have any chance of acclimating to warmer sea temperatures.

In short, it was a successful trip.  Ironically, the two days Tropical Storm Chris was 80-90 miles North of us were the calmest and didn't stop us from working.

Derek

New Station Design for Salt River

The Integrated Coral Observing Network (ICON, formerly called CREWS) station within the Salt River Bay National Historical Park and Ecological Preserve in St. Croix will have a new design, beginning in August, 2006.

Cheers,
Jim Hendee