September 5, 2012
CTD deployment and recovery
I talk a lot about having/getting water to incubate and how we use a CTD but I thought it would be a good idea to show you what I mean.
Now the bottom 3 pictures show a big crane deploying the CTD. Its the metal thing hanging. This has 24 10 liter bottles on it that we can control when the open and close. It also has a bunch of sensors on it that can tell us things like what depth its at, temperature, salinity, how much light, etc. We can use these paramaters to decide where we want to get our water from and the just close a bottle and seal that water in. Now the CTD can come up and we have water from different discrete depths.
The top two pictures show the CTD in the water.
The top right shows a scientist and a crew member on board waiting for the CTD to come up so they can recover it. They use those hooks to get a hold of it and the rope to steady it as it is craned onto the boat.