New Proposed Locations for Moorings

Below is the gridded bathymetry for the area near the central flux mooring, with the original proposed locations (black symbols) of the flux mooring (star) and prawler moorings (circles). The new locations are shown by the red symbols. The moorings have been moved to be in an area with flatter, more predictable topography.

Here is an explanation from Billy Kesler:

We had a phone conversation among the mooring people here and at WHOI Wednesday and I think we've agreed that this little plateau is our target for the array center. The WHOI mooring will be about 25nm south and 2nm west of its nominal position. I guess that means that everything else we do will correspondingly shift south. That shouldn't affect anything about the features we will sample, since the choice of 25N,38W was nominal and approximate, but the mooring ops look a lot easier at the new position. We don't think it makes any difference to have the PMEL moorings rotated relative to the WHOI mooring, either, as long as this remains a right triangle so we can calculate gradients.

The idea is that we don't want to get out there and find that we're trying to deploy a mooring on a steep slope, and end up having to move one of them, and then get stuck with some kind of non-right triangle or inconsistent distances between them. The plateau means that we can probably get close to our target 20km-separations and right-angle configuration.

This is not final. We're in the process of checking this with other bathymetry data; obviously a gridded bathymetry without a real survey is approximate!