On Wed 26 August, we had the first full field test of the MCIP carts which went really well. A MCIP cart stands for Mobile Cart Instrumentation Platform. An instrumented MCIP is shown in the first picture of the gallery below. It is basically a steel wheelbarrow that can roll into the surfzone. It has a range of instrumentation, including an ADV current meter, pressures sensor, thermistor, dye fluorometer, turbidity sensor, pitch/yaw/roll, and GPS, that go to a data acquisition system.
This system enables easy measurements of surfzone quantities. Normally it is much more intensive to deploy an instrumented tripod in the surfzone. This can be easily and rapidly deployed!
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- MCIP cart close-up
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- Derek Grimes and Falk Feddersen wheeling the MCIP into the surfzone
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- Falk Feddersen, Nirnmesh Kumar, Brian Woodward, and Kai Hally-Rosendahl checking out the MCIP in the surfzone with SIO pier in the background
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- Un-attaching the cart from the sand
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- Nirnimesh Kumar and Brian Woodward recovering the MCIP
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- Adjusting cables from the MCIP
With these easy conditions on the test day it was no sweat. We got the MCIP out to waist deep water, locked it into place and then let it take data. On this day we did not actually put dye in the water so we did not take any dye measurements, but we do have temperature measurements over an hour.
What is very interesting is that the ocean is unusually warm for Southern California (25 deg C is 77 deg F!!!). But also over an hour the temperature changes by about 0.7 degC (1.3 deg F). What causes these large and fast fluctuations?