Apex Surface Mooring (GS01SUMO)

The Southern Ocean Apex Surface Mooring is co-located with Apex Profiler Mooring.  Additionally, at the Southern Ocean site are two identical Flanking Subsurface that make up the equidistant sides of a triangle of Moorings (50 km) from the co-located Profiler and Surface Moorings.  The Surface Mooring is located in 4,800 meters of water in the Southern Ocean, SW of Chile.  The triangular configuration moorings provide unique spatial array through which instruments fixed to moorings continuously collect data through time and gliders sample the area between the moorings. The Southern Ocean site is one of four high latitude open ocean locations in the OOI that provide observations to gain better insight into global ocean circulation and climate.  In particular instruments on the Surface Buoy will provide key insights into climate dynamics associated with air-sea fluxes.

Like other Open Ocean Surface Moorings, the Southern Ocean Apex Surface Mooring is specifically designed to examine global phenomena as well as withstand rough sea conditions associated with high latitude, deep, open ocean sites. The Surface Mooring contains instruments attached to a Surface Buoy floating on the sea surface, Near Surface Instrument Frame 12 meters below the surface, and instruments attached to the Mooring Riser at fixed depths through the water column. The Surface Buoy provides a platform on which to secure surface instruments above the sea surface, below the sea surface, and across the interface between. Additionally the Surface Buoy contains an antenna to transmit data to shore via satellite.

This site was suspended on: 01/15/2020.

Instruments

This site includes following instruments. To learn more about an instrument type, select its name on the left. To see the relevant data streams for a particular instrument, select the instrument code in the first column which will take you to the OOI Data Portal.