The R/V Meteor has a meteorological station from the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD) and a technician to operate it on board. In 1964, the previous Meteor was the first research vessel with a meteorological station operated by the DWD. When the ship was replaced by the current Meteor in 1986, a meteorological station […]
What is the base of life in the open sea? This is a very complex question, because many factors and forces are at work in the high sea. But let’s start somewhere, maybe with the water itself… Upwelling regions are, in simple terms, a convergence of deep ocean currents bringing cold water, rich in nutrients, to the […]
As a computer scientist I am used to working with different types of data collected from various sources. Recently, I started my PhD in the MarData program that aims at bringing together – amongst others – computer science and oceanography. “That’s cool!”, I thought, “just another kind of data to do analyses on!”. But the […]
HOW IT STARTED In my entire life, I have never been on the high sea; so to sleep and wake up the next day to nothing but the greeting of screeching of the ship and sounds of the rolling waves and the background music aboard is interesting. Yes, on several occasions I have been involved […]
During my Bachelor program, me and my fellows learned a lot about the physics of ocean properties, circulation and much more. Apart from the complex formulas, the most interesting parts were the plots, which showed the properties of ocean waters and their dynamics all around the world. In simple terms, we used big datasets and […]
Ocean is not only home to wildlife that we can observe with our own eyes, such as big mammals, fishes and seaweed. There are also small living organisms, which we do not always know about, because we do not see them with our naked eyes. In Ocean Science, to see beneath the ocean surface, the […]
It has been more than two weeks now that we started our research cruise M159 from Recife to Mindelo. I am surprised how quickly I got used to living and working on board of the Meteor. After only a few days, it feels as if I have been on the research vessel for weeks because […]
En la soledad de un laboratorio a horas de la medianoche (hora que por cierto disfruto) y café de por medio a bordo del buque de investigación Meteor navegando hacia el próximo punto de muestreo es que redacto este blog. La calma del buque y la música de Rammstein en mis oídos me ayudan a […]
Being on a research cruise in the tropical Atlantic and Labrador Sea has more similarities than you might think. First of all, we take measurements of the same current, the so-called “Deep Western Boundary Current”. This current originates in the Labrador Sea and transports cold waters from the north all the way to Brazil. It […]
On board of the Research Vessel Meteor, we are currently sailing through the western tropical Atlantic. This region is particularly interesting for me, Josephine Herrford, and other oceanographers, as it represents a crossroad for different currents transporting water from all kind of remote regions around the globe. In oceanography, “water masses” are a fundamental, but […]