This week, we recovered, serviced, and redeployed the last mooring of our cruise, the K1 mooring. This mooring measured continuously temperature and salinity in the central Labrador Sea since the early 1990s. More recently, oxygen sensors have been added to the uppermost part of the mooring. Measuring oxygen in the central Labrador Sea is quite interesting as the deep convection there results in intense oxygen uptake.
The K1 mooring was also the most complex mooring that we had to deploy as it has a large surface buoy with an instrument to transmit its datasets in near real-time to a global database by satellites. Near real-time datasets greatly improve the accuracy of weather forecasts and ocean analysis as they are assimilated into weather models.