WELCOME

This brilliant short film was produced by Zoe Waring and shot on a GoPro throughout the SMILES Cruise 2015.

SMILES 2015.

  • Image above supplied courtesy of NASA with thanks.

    Welcome to the website for the ‘Surface Mixed Layer Evolution at Submesoscales’ project.

    SMILES is a combined observational and numerical modelling experiment funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council. It aims to improve our understanding of the role played by submesoscale processes at the subantarctic front in the Southern Ocean.

    The three year project involves researchers from Plymouth University, Cambridge University, Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the British Antarctic Survey, and LOCEAN in France.

    Our work will improve our understanding of how processes within the oceanic surface mixed layer impact on climate and marine life. The processes within the oceanic surface mixed layer is the upper portion of the ocean which is in direct contact with the atmosphere and through which climatically important properties like heat, freshwater and atmospheric gases are exchanged between the ocean and atmosphere.

    Within this website you’ll be able to learn a little more about exactly what submesoscales are and why we need to study them, how we’re doing that from both the modelling and observational perspective. You will also gain some insight into how we go about our work as oceanographers. You can see where the team members come from, what they do, and what tools they use to do this. The gallery in particular shows some great pictures from the cruise (designated JR311) aboard the British Antarctic Survey research vessel, the RRS James Clark Ross.

  • The SMILES team to present first findings at Ocean Sciences, New Orleans.

    February 6th 2016

    The SMILES team will be presenting results from the 2015 cruise at the AGU Ocean Sciences Meeting in New Orleans in February.

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  • Latest SMILES Project Update

    June 26th 2015

    The drifters we released during JR311 are still communicating and sending us their positions, providing crucial information about the evolution of ‘our’ eddy.

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  • The end of the SMILES Cruise

    May 23rd 2015

    I am writing this from the hotel lobby in Santiago where we are waiting to leave for the next of our four flights needed to get back to the UK from the Falklands.

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  • Closing the loop

    May 13th 2015

    On 8 May, we deployed three drifters at the top of a meander in a strong current that coincides with an abrupt change in temperature called the subpolar front.

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  • Taking a breath in the Southern Ocean

    April 28th 2015

    The Southern Ocean has a strong impact on the global climate: it acts as a buffer for global warming, by pumping heat and carbon out of the atmosphere and injecting them in the deep seas for centuries to millennia.

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Timeline