During the two years of CTD-SRDL deployments in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic waters within MEOP, almost 68,000 CTD profiles have been collected by 166 seals across large swaths of these data sparse regions. A large proportion of these profiles were obtained at high southern latitudes during wintertime, often from within areas of 80% ice coverage or more.
The number of profiles collected within discrete 5 x 2.5 degree grid cells during the two years of MEOP South operation. Image: MEOP team
In all, 19 sets of deployments were carried out during the summer seasons 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 by 7 of the MEOP teams and their colleagues. All deployments were done on Southern elephant seals or Weddell seals, either from shore-based research stations on the subantarctic islands or mainland Antarctica, or from ships during oceanographic research cruises in the area. the figure to the right shows the number of profiles collected within 5 x 2.5 degree grid cells acrosss the Southern Ocean, illustrating the impressive coveage throughout theregion. the coverage is particularly high along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, where up to 4,200 profiles have beeen collected within each grid cell! these data are likely to constitute an important contribution to research along this coastline that has shown some of the most rapid ocean warming trends over the past 50 years.
Data are still incoming, and we expect the coverage to improve further over this second Antarctic winter. Much of these data are already being distributed via the Global Telecommunications Centre (GTS) and made available to meteorological institutes around the world. They are being incorporated in real-time into global and regional operational oceanographic studies and weather and climate forecasting.
