RRS James Clark Ross Cruise 52, 11 Sep-17 Oct 2000. AutoFlux trials cruise, UK to Falklands passage

This report describes the work undertaken on the AutoFlux system by SOC staff on the RRS James Clark Ross during the UK to Falklands passage between 11 September and 17 October 2000. This work coincided with the Atlantic Meridional Transect (AMT) 11 cruise (JR52) which ended on 11 October 2000, and is described elsewhere (Woodward, 2000). The SOC presence on the ship was sponsored by John King (BAS) as part of his Q3 (Antarctic Climate Processes) science program. The aim of the cruise was to test and develop the AutoFlux air-sea interaction system and its associated prototype instrumentation. The system is intended to provide real-time air-sea fluxes of momentum, sensible heat, latent heat and CO2, in addition to the usual mean meteorological parameters. The fluxes are calculated via the ‘inertial dissipation’ method (Yelland et al., 1998), using data from various fast-response instruments. Most of the instruments used in the system have been well proved during SOC research cruises over the last 10 years or more, but the dedicated sonic temperature sensor and the infra-red H2O/CO2 sensor are prototype instruments developed by colleagues involved in the AutoFlux project (MAST project MAS3-CT97-0108). Likewise, the logging and processing system is itself based on software systems which have been developed at SOC/IOS since the 1980s, but many aspects of the system are new and were tested and developed further during the cruise. By the fourth week of the cruise the system was automatically producing hourly direct measurements of the air-sea fluxes and was sending summary messages of the data back to SOC via the ORBCOMM satellite communications system in near real time