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Hunting for eddies

“Hunting for eddies—this is effectively what we are doing with this instrument,” said Fiammetta Straneo, a researcher at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This month, Straneo’s team is looking for eddies that affect sea surface temperature. “We are using satellite images to find their general location, and then driving the ship back and forth through the region to find their exact location,” she said. Straneo is currently at sea with post-doctoral scholar Carlos Moffat, shown here splicing a line for their “eddy-hunting” instrument, called a CTD (for conductivity, temperature, and depth). The goal of their project is to understand the role of the upper ocean in the formation of some of the largest stratus clouds off the coast of Chile.
(Photo by Fiammetta Straneo, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)