The VISUFRONT people
by Jean-Olivier Irisson, on
The dust has settled. The cruise is now over. The Miamians are back in Miami. ISIIS is in a container, on a ship, sailing back towards the US. The cruise gear has been put back in the drawers, crates and shelves in Villefranche. And what are we left with? A little sleep deprivation, many memories and a lot of data. Quite a few megabytes of physical data and about 18 terabytes of images. That is 9 transects across the Ligurian current to examine the frontal structure, 7 transects along the current to examine small-scale patchiness and diel variability, and 15 transects cutting into the same water mass during the Lagrangian experiment.
The collection of this amazing dataset was made possible by the cleverness, dedication, and hard work of the team of this cruise. I dealt with the organisation so I get to thank everyone and it is with great pleasure that I do so.
There was the core of the VISUFRONT team, the four of us who stayed on the ship the whole time and manned the long 12 hours shifts between 3 am and 3 pm: Jessica, Robin, Cédric, and myself. There was Bob, who made it a point to come even though he was in the middle of a complicated move across the US to a new job. There was the jellies-team: Léo, Fabien, and Martin, relentless at counting jellies, all night long. There was our CTD expert, Vincent, who left his soon-to-deliver wife ashore to come with us for two days and make the reference CTD casts which will allow to inter-calibrate all instruments. There was the drifter team: Simone and Mireno, who came on the ship, as well as Annalisa and Anne, who made the drifters available, and allowed us to track a water mass for nearly 48 h. There were Laurent and Hassane who coordinated the gliders upstream of us, with the help of Florent who also tested a new jellyfish-watching camera mounted on an Argo float. There was Grigor, who so efficiently coordinated the arrival and departure of the gear with the authorities of the Nice harbour (and rescued our GPS signal on a Sunday night!). There were Laurent and Émilie who helped us set up the UVP on the first day. There was Marie who documented all this with her camera. There were all the people who participated to the discussions to set up this sampling plan: Louis, Philippe, Claire, etc. And finally, there was the crew of the ship, the Tethys, who proved to be efficient, competent, yet fun to work with: Renaud, Stéphane, Fred, Laurent, Gwen, Michael, and Bertrand.
To all of them, a very deep and sincere Merci !
