Exploring on Okeanos pt.1

Good Afternoon everyone!

I am back to tell you all about my internship that I went on with NOAA Okeanos. I will break this blog into two sections. The first being the technical side of the trip, objective, what did I learn, etc.. and the second part will be what i enjoyed the most out of the experience and what the highlights for me were.

The internship that I embarked on from May 30th through June 14th was the Okeanos Explorer-in-Training (EiT) program, where you gain knowledge and understanding to the process of data collecting and how the data is cleaned and prepared for the public. The overall importance and objective of the mapping cruise and mapping in general is to provide information on the surveyed areas that leads to further exploration and research. The Okeanos Explorer engages in community driven exploration where information from the mapping cruises that they have completed will ultimately determine where the Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) dives will occur. The second and most important objective while aboard the vessel were cleaning and processing the data being collected by the sonar, located at the bottom of the boat, ashore. They were 4 EiT's and we had shifts where it was two or more people on watch where in my case i was one of two interns and 1 watch lead. Our duties consist of creating daily products of what we surveyed, subbottom profiling,check water column data and process it to see if there are any underground seeps etc. Our job is to make sure all data is cleaned and process and sent to shore before we reached port. Though all sonars on the boat is quite important, the ones that we focused on heavily where the XBT, EK 60 Singlebeam EM 302 Multibeam and the Knudesen Subbottom Profiler.

XBT , EK 60 Singlebeam, EM 302 Multibeam, Knudsen Subbottom Profiler, CTD