July 23, 2009

This week has been busy. Nate gave us all of the Phoebe data and showed us how to compile it all into one place in MATLAB. After doing that, we were able to graph all the Phoebe data at once. After Nate talked with Joe Cho, they decided that it would be helpful to see the data in horizontal layers. Again, Nate showed us how to manipulate the data so that we could use data that was only taken from a specific depth, 0 to 2.5 meters. With this, we were able to compare this layer's salinity with the model's prediction of what the layer's salinity would be.

We found that the model predicted salinities that were always close to 34 psu. The data told a different story. The salinity was often lower, in some cases lower than 30 psu. We identified the time at which a specific area was consistently around 30 psu. These data came from May 24, 2009. We looked at model images from CMOP, and they show that the plume is not close to where the data suggests it is. We are currently looking into why this might be.