Since the beginning of the AMT, the programme was centred around optics, satellites and ocean biogeochemistry. It was this that established the AMT as one of the world’s leading oeanographic programmes (and hence data sets), which we are now able to call ‘long-term’ as we enter this new phase with Oceans 2025 funding for the next 5 years. The big gap in our knowledge was always recognised as being the very limited ocean physics studies that were carried out during all the earlier cruises. However this has now been remedied to a large extent with the inclusion of the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) on-board team of Jo and Stuart, with invaluable help and guidance from John Allen up to the Azores. Although to be factually correct Jo has just started working at Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory (POL).
Jo and Stuart
The output is some excellent data which is near real-time and enables us to study the outputs from the Moving Vessel Profiler (MVP) and Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) to see what is going on in the water column and how that links to the chemistry and biology being studied in the main labs.