During the PROVESS Northern North Sea Experiment one of the main targets was the determination of turbulence characteristics in the surface mixed layers, the pycnocline and the benthic boundary layer.  For that reason micro-structure measurements have been conducted with the MICSOS profiler owned by the Alfred-Wegener-Institute of Marine and Polar Research (AWI) during the first stage of this experiment on board of the German research vessel Valdivia in autumn 1998.  The cruise was co-ordinated and led by Prof. Dr. Gunter Krause of AWI. Dr. Dr. Helmut Baumert and Johannes Post  participated from HYDROMOD Scientific Consulting and Dr. Kurt Holtsch (Sea & Sun Technologie GmbH) was contracted by HYDROMOD for technical support and maintenance of the instrument.  This team operated the MST Profiler developed within the MICSOS project. This instrument is a free sinking instrument specially designed to measure in addition to standard CTD data temperature variations and the current shear with high frequency and high relative but less absolute accuracy.  Almost 500 micro-structure profiles were obtained at the Central Anchor Station No. 76 in the period of October 10th to 14th, 1998 . The measurements have been partitioned in 61 "events" of approximately 1.5 hours duration. At the beginning of each "event" a CTD profile was measured with a Seabird CTD followed by a series of usually 8 rapidly measured micro-structure profiles.  In total more than 3.5 Gigabytes of raw data have been acquired. These data require intensive pre- and post-processing which is presently ongoing and envisaged for completion within spring 1999.

 
 

The finally processed data will contain interval-averaged turbulence characteristics like e.g. Thorpe and Osmidov scales, dissipation rates, Cox numbers and Austausch coefficients.  Within further evaluations these parameters will be brought in conjunction with other measurements obtained by other groups during the a.m. cruise, among others high-precision CTD and ADCP current profiles. It is expected that this will finally give an integrated picture of the fine- and micro-scale physical processes in the water column. In this conjunction HYDROMOD conducts own developments for optimisation of the micro-structure data processing including upgrade and integration of evaluation methods resulting from latest achievements in physical oceanography.

 

Example of finally processed and visualised CTD data from the PROVESS Northern North Sea Experiment with displayed precision temperature data (upper left), salinity (upper right), density (st – lower left) and T-S diagram (lower right).

Example of preliminarily processed and visualised high-resolution micro-structure temperature measurements (left) and computed displacement (right) for a profile section between 0 and 60 metres of water depth.

Example of preliminarily processed and visualised averaged micro-structure temperature measurements (upper left) and computed Thorpe scale (upper right), Austausch coefficient (lower left) and sinking velocity of the probe (lower right) for a profile section between 0 and 60 metres of water depth.

 

EUREKA Project No. 1246    EUROMAR MICSOS    Micro-structure technology developments applied in PROVESS The EUREKA project EUROMAR-MICSOS (MICro Structure Ocean Sonde) focussed on development and qualification of micro-structure technology towards an operational level and broader applicability. The project was initialised in the early 90ths by Dr. Hartmut Prandke and Adolf Stips, two senior scientists from the micro-structure research group of the former Institute of Marine Research of the German Democratic Republic and K.D. Pfeiffer of HYDROMOD. The project was supported by the EUREKA-EUROMAR umbrella project and by the German Ministry of Education, Science and Technology.  The MICSOS project was conducted by  the German company ME Meerestechnik Elektronik GmbH (ME) responsible for developing the measurement system (the MST-Profiler), a shear probe and a fast temperature sensor, a shear probe calibration unit and software components, the Space Application Institute (SAI) of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in Ispra (Italy) which provided scientific back-up, contributed with versatile methodologies and first user experiences and conducted various sea trials and measurements  and HYDROMOD engaged in developing data processing and evaluation tools (see below) and for the national and international co-ordination of the project. Further, also the working group of Prof. Werner Kroebel at the Institute of Applied Physics of the University of Kiel participated in the project's first phase with a work package attempting to derive directly seawater density on the microscale by high-speed measurements of the refraction index; AWI contributed as well as a potential first user. Later on the Finnish Institute of Marine Research (Dr. Kaisa Kononen) and the Swiss Water and Environment Agency EAWAG (Dr. Alfred G. Wuest) supported technical developments and gave support for testing, first applications and sea trials.  Within MICSOS project the partners developed micro-structure profilers, micro-structure shear and temperature probes, a shear probe calibration unit, operational data processing and evaluation software, post-processing software as well as related services towards routine applicability and marketable state.  Besides these technological achievements, MICSOS contributed considerably to awareness creation and intensified application of micro-structure measurements in European marine research and stipulated therewith related topics in marine science. This is underpinned by the involvement of members of the MICSOS project in other MAST III initiatives like MITEC, PHASE, BASYS, PROVESS and CARTUM.

 
 

 

The MICSOS Evaluation and Processing Unit (MICSOS-EPU) is a software package adapted to the profiling instrument and to individual user needs and requirements.      It contains pre- and post-processing facilities and evaluation routines for standard CTD and micro-structure measurements.   The program is fully controlled by a graphical interface and includes various state of the art data documentation and management facilities.

The NetCDF Data Viewer is a visualisation and display tool for data processed with the MICSOS-EPU and allows direct access to these data.    It contains a variety of functionalities to visualise data from standard CTD and micro-structure profilers. Further, the user can define individual graphical displays. Every single date and all related documentation can be accessed and retrieved directly and comfortable.    For the case of the MICSOS-EPU these data and related meta-information are internally stored in the "intelligent" NetCDF format.    For more information please contact   K.D. Pfeiffer at HYDROMOD.

 
 

Acknowledgements:  HYDROMOD's contributions to PROVESS are partially funded by the European Commission DG XII - MAST Programme under contract no. MAS3-CT97-0159. HYDROMOD is indebted to the German Ministry of Research and Technology (BMBF) for partial funding of EUROMAR-MICSOS  contributions and developments  in the years 1994 to 1998 under contract nos. FKZ03F136B and FKZ03F0180B.

© HYDROMOD Scientific Consulting, 1999  - all rights reserved in compliance with applicable terms and conditions for EU MAST Projects and agreements within the PROVESS Project Consortium.  Revision: 1.0 - released and delivered to the public section of the  PROVESS web site 1999-02-05.

Last update:   1999-02-05