In the week of May 26th - 30th a team from AOML will be visiting the CREWS station in St. Croix, USVI, that is located off the north coast of the island near Salt River Bay. AOML's Ian Enochs and Mike Jankulak will be traveling to St. Croix, and contractor Jon Fajans will be joining them to receive training in station maintenance procedures.
The station has been offline since last December, and on this trip the station will be outfitted with a digital cellular modem to replace its GOES transmitter. This will give AOML 24x7, instantaneous access to the station's complete data collection, as compared to the once-per-hour, 20-second, low-baud-rate GOES window used previously. Data collection at this site by CREWS dates back to June of 2002.
This station is also a monitored site in NCRMP (the National Coral Reef Monitoring Program). In service of this program, and as part of a collaboration with CRED (NOAA's Coral Reef Ecosystem Division in Hawai`i), the team will be installing ARMS (autonomous reef monitoring structures), CAUs (calcification accretion units) and BMUs (bioerosion monitoring units) to join the STRs (subsurface temperature recorders) that are already in place at the site.
(signed)
Mike Jankulak