EqPac: A Process Study in the Central Equatorial Pacific

Authors | First Paragraph | Full Article | Citation

Authors

James W. Murray | School of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

Margaret W. Leinen | Graduate School of Oceanography, University of Rhode Island, Narragansett, RI, USA

Richard A. Feely | NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, WA, USA

J.R. Toggweiler | NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA

Rik Wanninkhof | NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, Miami, FL, USA

Top

First Paragraph

EqPac is the United States-Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (US-JGOFS) process study in the central equatorial Pacific. The first EqPac cruises sailed in January 1992 during a moderately strong El Niño. This was fortuitous for our studies of chemical and biological distributions because El Niño events are difficult to predict, and the lead time for a project of this size is long. There was virtually no previous upper-water-column chemical or biological data for El Niño conditions in the central equatorial Pacific. Now an El Niño has been studied in considerable detail, and it will be easy to sample the extremes in environmental conditions by sampling non-El Niño conditions (including La Niña) in 1993 and the years thereafter. The implementation of EqPac illustrates how difficult it is to mount a large-scale interdisciplinary study of the ocean when the interannual variability is large.

Top

Full Article

1.35 MB pdf

Top

Citation

Murray, J.W., M.W. Leinen, R.A. Feely, J.R. Toggweiler, and R. Wanninkhof. 1992. EqPac: A process study in the central equatorial Pacific. Oceanography 5(3):134–142, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.1992.01.

Top