First ISIIS deployments
by Jessica Luo, on
Monday, July 22 marked the fifth day of the cruise and we felt ready to give ISIIS a go in the water. In the process of calibrating the camera before leaving Nice, we realized that the images seemed a little too dark. We then checked everything – the line scanning rate, the camera software, and then the camera pod itself. Upon opening it, saw that the camera pod was flooded from our 2 m test dunk in Nice harbor the previous evening. Good thing that the water was only minimal and did not damage the equipment – and, if we had not done the test dunk the previous night, and if we had not noticed the slight abnormality in the image darkness, we would have tried to run ISIIS on a regular transect (to 100 m)… and had been completely screwed.
After a bit of scrambling to dry out the interior of the camera pod, we take off for test runs in Monaco waters. We had to sample in Monaco on Monday because the French Navy had closed off all French waters for three days. However, the thin strip of Monaco waters we were able to sample in cut perpendicular to the Ligurian current, so we were able to get roughly the same kind of transect that we would have sampled had we been able to adhere to our original plan. We finished Monday’s sampling by heading to the BOUSSOLE point at midnight to start our regular transects. The transect between Nice and the BOUSSOLE point has been studied by LOV for quite some time, using both ship cruises and remote systems such as gliders. It is therefore well known in terms of the physics and allows us to build on this knowledge.
