RIOT IOP 1 support vessel

The overriding science goal of the Researching Interior Ocean Trajectories DRI is to improve our understanding of interior submesoscale currents (iSMC). These features are the interior analogs to the strong surface submesoscale features that have been studied for several decades but are more poorly understood. They are characterized by horizontal scales of 100 m to 10 kilometers, vertical scales of 0.1 to 100 meters and time scales of minutes to days. We expect that they are important in setting the vertical and horizontal mixing rates in the interior and may even form a crucial nexus between geostrophic (balanced) flows, internal waves, and mixing. We plan to study iSMC in at a separation point of the California Undercurrent in the vicinity of the Southern California Channel Islands.