Finding Eddy Vol. 2

The last week of our cruise has begun, and the eddy hunt is aiming for an eddy in the East of Trinidad and Tobago, Eddy2. The trick with catching Eddy2 is to first estimate his dimensions by using sea level anomaly maps which give insight on surface eddies that are often overlying deeper eddies, like […]

Chasing clouds

Part 1: Why chase clouds Imagine you would like to have a nice barbeque on Sunday but the weather report seems quite undecided whether it will rain or not. You wonder: “How hard can it be to predict if it rains? It seems like the forecasts are always off!”. As scientists, we face this challenge […]

Die Meeresoberfläche im Fokus

(English version below) Es dreht sich und dreht sich und dreht sich: 24/7 rotiert unser Doppler-Radar nun auf der MARIA S. MERIAN und sammelt Daten. Dabei misst es die Rauigkeit der Meeresoberfläche, aus der Parameter wie Seegang, Strömung und Wind bestimmte werden können. Unser Radar ist ein modifiziertes Navigationsradar (auch marines X-Band-Radar genannt). Herkömmliche nautische […]

Up in the air

A couple of days ago we started heading north again. We are now in an area where also the research vessel Meteor and the research plane HALO are operating. HALO circles every second day above our heads measuring both with its instruments on board as well as by releasing dropsondes. Those small meteorological devices descend […]

The sailors of 2020

by Claudia Acquistapace (see original Italian version below) How do you imagine them, the sailors in 2020? I didn’t want to believe the classic stereotype, of blackened men, big as wardrobes, strong, and full of tattoos. But instead. On board this ship, the crew I’ve met are almost all twice as tall as me, very […]

Who is Eddy, Vol. I

by Melina Mehlmann The last couple of days have strongly been influenced by the search for ‘Eddy’. What does he look like? What are his dimensions? Where does he hide? For the Eddy search we have used all of our resources. Six physical oceanographic instruments are now used in turn. A moving vessel profiler is […]

Rotola, Rantola e Sputa

Photo: Arne Bendinger

(Eine zweite Version auf deutsch findest Du im unteren Teil des Blogbeitrags!) Non dormo. Come potrei del resto, sono le otto. Sono stesa nel letto e sotto di me, intorno a me, il mare sbatte, rantola e sputa. Sento la forza dell’acqua schiantarsi sul guscio di questa nave, immagino la spuma, ondeggio. E poi i […]

Raindrops keep fallin’ on my head

Yesterday we changed the setup of the W Band radar to better look at the clouds I (Claudia Acquistapace) am interested in puffy clouds, like in cartoons. It is unbelievable that these small puffy clouds really matter for the climate of the entire planet. But that’s what we found, and that’s why we are here. […]

The Max Planck Cloudkite first flight

Eberhard Bodenschatz January 19, we made a test flight of Tiny 1 (T1, the 250 m3 Helikite) and the spherical 180 m3 floatation balloon “Augsburg”. Things went “okay”. The 7m tethered spherical balloon did not fly as expected. As we needed to fill it only to 70% of full (due to expansion at 2km) the sphere […]

In the beginning there was light…

The first couple of days at Barbados were used to recharge all human sunlight batteries to be switched to operating mode at any time. On the ship, loading was done successfully and after all boxes were unpacked, stored, and lushed, we (the physical oceanography team) were missing one of those carefully packed away boxes without […]