Posted by Johann Lutjeharms on November 28, 2001 at 22:54:37:
Dear Deirdre
I looked at your informative poster in Mar del Plata and I have now looked at it again in its virtual form. I remained in awe of the potential your ASTTEX project has for giving us so much more information on the interocean exchanges south of Africa. This is going to be an exciting venture. It really is a well-designed and thoughtout project.
If Liza Beal gets in her moorings in the Agulhas Current proper at the same time and if Allan Meyer here at UCT succeeds in getting funding for monitoring the Agulhas Return Current with PIES simultaneously, we are going to have a coherent data set that is bound to tell us things we never dreamt about.
I do have a few questions on matters that were not entirely clear to me from your poster.
You give a solid introduction in which you set out what is known about the complexity of the water masses in the Cape Couldron, including filaments from the Agulhas and cold filaments from the subantarctic. We now know that there also are cyclones that come from the continental shelf and that seem to move at right angles to the path of the Agulhas rings (see e.g. Richardson and Garzoli, DSR special KAPEX issue, submitted). How great a role do you think all these smaller features have in the total budget of interocean exchange? Even with the simultaneous altimeter data, will 80 km spacing in the moorings suffice to resolve them?
You have been discussing the placement of your line of moorings on the TOPEX/Poseidon lines with a number of people. I suggested one could go one or two lines further south (or closer to the source). Will de Ruijter seemed to agree with me. Perhaps other colleagues might disagree with this advice and have good reasons for doing so. I would be very interested to hear what others think about the optimal location for the line of ASTTEX moorings.
Keep up the good work
Johann