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Going With the Flow

September 18, 2014

RAFOS floats await deployment to the Iceland Sea aboard the R/V Hakon Mosby, operated by the Institute for Marine Research (IMR) in Bergen, Norway. This July, WHOI’s Marieke Femke de Jong and Amy Bower joined their IMR collaborator Henrik Soiland on a study of the pathways and variability of the Deep Western Boundary Current. In 2009, Bower co-authored a paper that identified previously unknown complexities in the North Atlantic circulation system using RAFOS data. Five years later, the oceanographers deployed the floats once again to measure sources of overflow water in the Denmark Strait. The floats spend up to two years in the ocean, at which point they send a signal to satellites, allowing scientists to download the stored data directly to their computers. (Photo by Marieke Femke de Jong, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)