Something interesting is brewing off the coast of Brazil:
A massive plankton bloom is slithering its way down the coast of the South Brazil Bight, right through where we plan to fly RU29 as we make our way to port in the upcoming months. Right now, this region is in their mid to late summer where the plankton can flourish in the long summer days. Although it is still early, we will keep an eye on this event as we may grasp this opportunity to do some sampling of the waters of the bloom as we prepare for recovery. To view live and archived data from NASA’s satellite repository, click here
Today the models of the currents have begun to disagree a bit with each other:
Myocean’s sweeping pattern is now flowing at almost a 90 deg angle compared to the tight RTOFS eddies at the surface
MyOcean- blue 0m
RTOFS- yellow 0m
MyOcean- blue 300m
RTOFS- yellow 300m
down to 300m, the difference strengthens as they part to nearly an angle of 150˚
MyOcean- blue 600m
RTOFS- yellow 600m
By 600 m depth, the current are almost completely the opposite of each other, and this pattern continues as we go down to the bottom of our oscillation past 900m
MyOcean- blue 900m
RTOFS- yellow 900m
Dark Blue- depth average currents
light blue- surface drift
Loking to 29’s calculations, overall the depth average current is still to the north west while the surface drift has intensified again to the south west.
Force Wind Sea & Honor