Cruise support: the CROZEX experiment

The Crozet natural iron bloom and Export experiment (CROZEX) was an NOCS project that employed two 5-week studies of the Crozet Plateau in the Southern Ocean where iron from shallow sediments initiates phytoplankton blooms in an otherwise iron-limited region (Fig. 1). NEODAAS provided NRT support for the cruises. Raymond Pollard, the PI, noted in October 2007: "There are 20 papers to be published this month in DSR2......the whole CROZEX cruise, and hence all papers arising from it, depended on your real time services to find optimum bloom and non-bloom sites. We reached the area AFTER the peak of the bloom, so have reconstructed the bloom from satellite data alone. A PhD thesis, just submitted, also heavily depends on sat data, and he has given several conference presentations." In fact five papers explicitly acknowledged NEODAAS (including Bakker et al., 2007; Pollard et al., 2007; Venables et al., 2007).

Figure 1: MODIS chl-a composite 7-13 Jan 2005 showing bloom at Crozet Plateau;

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