Posted by Olaf Boebel on December 06, 2001 at 03:41:02:
Dear Deirdre and co-workers,
Thank you for this nice contribution. ASTTEX will certainly have a great impact on our inter-ocean exchange estimates.
Tagging onto Johann's comments, I would suggest deploying the PIES much further away from the Cape Cauldron and downstream across the Agulhas Corridor. 90%+ trajectories of MODAS and RAFOS Rings cross 5 E between 28S and 37S. Placing your PIES there along a TOPEX line will capture the bulk of Agulhas Ring anomalies. Here, however, the rings will have much nicer properties (circular, separate, not attached to cyclones) than where you currently have positioned your line. I would also suspect that the GEM-ETTA errors might be reduced in these regions. You could make errors estimates like in this paper, but now separately for the two alternative regions, to see if this hold true.
Regarding the technical side of virtual poster development, I must say that I enjoyed being able to sit through the poster rather than have to stand in front of it. While all the figures are magnificent, the typing was occasionally a bit small. You could probably also help the reader a lot by condensing the information and giving details in 'sidepanels', rather than having most stuff arranged linearly.
I liked the Next, Up, Previous buttons on the bottom of each page a lot, and did not go back to the overview. The drawback was some loss of orientation of where the poster is taking me.
Figure 3b: Do SAMW rings really have such high salinity?
Figure 3c&d: All the mapped area that is not covered by circles (i.e. data) is essentially an extrapolation of your data, isn't it? It might be good to have a separate statistics for T(z)/S(Z) GEM-ETTA estimates with eta and tau falling into the range set by the climatology, and those lying outside.
Figure 7: How do you explain that some IES do show a high (expected) correlation (e.g. 59) with Topex and others don't (e.g. 62)? Why is the high correlation sometimes not co-located with the PIE (i.e. #56)?
Figure 16: Why is the barotropic low-frequency signal so strong at 58 and not at 61 and 62, which brace the location of 58? Is this the main path for the barotropically intense eddies?
Figure 21: Isn't it rather a decrease in intermediate depth salinity at day 325 than an increase? Dark purple seems less salty than the blue hue on the plot. If so, what about your explanation in the following paragraph?
Regarding hydrographic data on the continental shelf, I just want to point out that there is a large number of data available for this region through the South African Data Center in Stellenbosch.