REU: Low-Latitude Western Boundary Currents in the Pacific Ocean

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This project constitutes the lead and coordination effort for a study involving four US institutions, and institutions from Australia and France. A joint field program will be carried out to study the water mass distributions, current structures and transport of the low-latitude western boundary currents in the western Equatorial Pacific. Focus will be on the confluence of northern and southern hemisphere waters, which arrive at the entrance to the Indonesian Seas via the South Equatorial Current, the New Guinea Coastal Undercurrent, and the Mindanao Current. Water mass tracers and direct current measurements will be employed. Lukas and Firing will carry out hydrographic, moored current meter, and shipboard Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) measurements, while coordinating the work of Fine (Miami) and Gammon (UW), who propose, via subcontracts, to carry out tracer studies (freons and tritium/helium). The hydrography will be done by the Scripps data acquisition facility, under a separate award. Richardson (WHOI) will deploy an array of surface drifters, to directly observe surface flows in the region. This experiment is a major process study contributing to the objectives of the US TOGA (Tropical Ocean and Global Atmosphere) Program.