ALBERT

Description: © The Author(s), 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Rossby, T., Flagg, C. N., Donohue, K., Fontana, S., Curry, R., Andres, M., & Forsyth, J. Oleander is more than a flower twenty-five years of oceanography aboard a merchant vessel. Oceanography, 32(3), (2019): 126-137, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2019.319.

Description: Since late fall 1992, CMV Oleander III has been measuring upper ocean currents during its weekly trips between Bermuda and Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, by means of an acoustic Doppler current profiler installed in its hull. The overarching objective of this effort has been to monitor transport in the Gulf Stream and surrounding waters. With 25 years of observation in hand, we note that the Gulf Stream exhibits significant year-to-year variations but no evident long-term trend in transport. We show how these data have enabled studies of oceanic variability over a very wide range of scales, from a few kilometers to the full 1,000 km length of its route. We report that the large interannual variations in temperature on the continental shelf are negatively correlated with flow from the Labrador Sea, but that variability in the strength of this flow cannot account for a longer-term warming trend observed on the shelf. Acoustic backscatter data offer a rich trove of information on biomass activities over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. A peek at the future illustrates how the new and newly equipped Oleander will be able to profile currents to greater depths and thereby contribute to monitoring the strength of the meridional overturning circulation.

Description: First and foremost we extend our heartfelt thanks to the Bermuda Container Line/Neptune Group Management Ltd for permission to operate an acoustic Doppler current profiler on board CMV Oleander III, a 150 kHz ADCP between 1992 and 2004, and a 75 kHz ADCP between 2005 and 2018. Their interest and support is gratefully acknowledged. Cor Teeuwen, our initial contact in Holland while the ship was still under construction, played an important role in facilitating the original ADCP installation. His evident interest to make this concept work has stimulated similar activities on other commercial vessels. The interest and willingness of the shipping industry to be supportive of science has been a very positive experience for all of us who have ventured in this direction. Initial funding came from NOAA and the Office of Naval Research. Since 1999, the National Science Foundation has supported the project through funding to the University of Rhode Island and Stony Brook University, and now also to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences (BIOS), which will be taking over the Oleander operation. NSF is also funding the current transition to the new CMV Oleander. In the early years, G. Schwartze and E. Gottlieb were very helpful with technical support for the project. This included frequent visits to the ship before we had the capability to transfer the data through the Ethernet. We thank Jules Hummon and Eric Firing for adapting the UNOLS-wide UHDAS ADCP operating system to the merchant marine environment. We thank E. Williams and P. Ortner at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, for making the 38 kHz ADCP data from Explorer of the Seas available to us. We also want to thank the NOAA Ship Of Opportunity Program for continued interest in and support of XBT operations along the Oleander section. That support started over 40 years ago and is now stronger than ever. All ADCP data from 1992 through 2018 have been archived at the Joint Archive for Shipboard ADCP (JASADCP), established at the University of Hawaii by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Averaged yearly data sets can be downloaded in ASCII text or NetCDF formats (http://ilikai.soest.hawaii.edu/​sadcp/main_inv.html). We thank Patrick Caldwell, JASADCP’s manager, for his assistance. All ADCP and XBT data can be obtained at the Stony Brook website: http://po.msrc.sunysb.edu/Oleander/. The URL to the project website is http://oleander.bios.edu—an updated data portal and products will soon be accessible here. An ERDDAP server for Oleander data (in the process of being configured) is at this address: http://erddap.​oleander.​bios.edu:​8080/​erddap/. The following link to BIOS lists over 40 publications that have used the ADCP data one way or another: http://oleander.bios.edu/publications/. We thank the two reviewers for their many interesting and helpful comments and suggestions.