Real Flippin’ Cool

Today I made the trek over to the FLIP to pick up scientist Ken Melville. Welcome aboard! On the way over, the driver showed me just how fast the small boat (which really is small) can go. We flew over the water – it was quite the ride! I felt very small in the small boat in the big ocean, but I did get some good snapshots of the Kilo Moana and FLIP. Funny, while I didn’t know what FLIP looked like, I lost memory of what the KM looked like. They’re both quite impressive!

Scientist Profile: Tommy Dickey Recap

Tommy Dickey is a tall man with a full head of (one might say fluffy) hair who rocks back in his chair as he talks enthusiastically about ocean optics. “People are always so disappointed when I tell them I don’t really scuba dive,” he says. “[They think] you can’t be an oceanographer and not go out scuba diving everyday.” Dickey may not scuba dive, but he has been on over 60 research cruises across the world and keeps coming back for more. Born and raised in Farmland, Indiana, as a child he dreamed of being a farmer. Oceanography was the closest he came to that, he chuckles, explaining that perhaps “the reason so many of us [Midwesterners] became oceanographers is because we saw the waves of wheat and then we saw the waves of the ocean and related [them].”

Dickey majored in physics and math as an undergrad before the Vietnam War broke out. To fulfill military service within a humanitarian U.S. agency, he joined the Coast Guard and taught electronics to marine technicians. During his last year, race riots broke out at the base in New York City. “There were shootings, there were beatings,” Dickey says. “It became such a problem that they had to do some kind of race relations workshops.” Dickey was chosen as one of two leaders for the then-called “race relations,” now-called “human relations” workshops. “There was the black guy and the white guy – so I was the white guy,” he explains. Perhaps “because of, or in spite of,” the workshops, the rioting did get better. Dickey says that these workshops were the most fun and educational part his time in the Coast Guard.

He took night classes in New Jersey at Stevens Institute of Technology to receive his master’s degree in physics, and then, after borrowing texts about meteorology and oceanography from his friends, he heard about a PhD program at Princeton in geophysical fluid dynamics – a combination of words that would strike fear into the hearts of many, but not Dickey’s. He applied, was accepted, and his career took off. After finishing his PhD study, he received a residential post-doctoral fellowship to do whatever he wanted at the University of Miami, he decided that what really interested him was interdisciplinary field work. Today Dickey, who recently was named a Secretary of the Navy/Chief of Naval Operations Chair in oceanography, is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and he is in the middle of what may be one of his last projects in the field – RaDyO. He plans to teach well into the future using a new textbook, exploring the World Ocean, written b Sean Chamberlin and himself. His two Great Pyrenees dogs, Teddy and Kiki, will assist him as he teaches.

The central question Dickey and his team want to answer is, how can we view objects above the surface while we’re below the surface? This question has everything to do with the ocean-air interface, where light enters the water. Once light hits the water, it is refracted, or bent, and one of three things may happen to it: it can scatter, or bounce between particles; it can be absorbed by a molecule, which will emit the energy as heat; or it can be photosynthesized to sustain life.

Dickey leads a team of scientists from across the United States and world, including
Scotland, Poland, Turkey, Italy, Australia, Canada, and New Jersey. They must measure an array of complex variables, such as sediments, phytoplankton, and small capillary waves to determine how light behaves in ocean water. Hopefully, the optical measurements his team collects can be modeled to convert fuzzy images into clear ones.

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Day 2: Beginning to Understand RaDyO

If you’ve ever been snorkeling or even owned a fish tank, you may have noticed that from under the water, you can see submerged objects quite clearly – but if you look up, you cannot see above the water. Light dances on the water’s wavy surface and a complex combination of chemicals, microorganisms, and water absorb, scatter, or photosynthesize the light, complicating the way a viewer or camera interprets the images.

The archer fish has learned to look up perfectly in calm waters. Found in both fresh and salt waters of Australia, India, the Philippines, and Polynesia under the roots of mangroves, the eyes of the archer fish compensate for the refraction of light hitting the water, enabling adult fish to spit water at unsuspecting insects with precise accuracy.

But out on the ocean, complex waves complicate the problem of viewing images that are above the water from below. So one cloudy Monday morning in September, 2008, head scientist Tommy Dickey and his team of scientists set out aboard the Kilo Moana to measure the optical properties of ocean waves. The Kilo Moana is a large swath hull ship with a stable platform designed for oceanographic research. It measures 186 feet long, or about half the length of a football field. Dolphins play in the Hawaiin vessel’s tail waves as it sets out toward its destination, about eight miles south of Carpenteria, California, near the Santa Barbara Channel Marine Reserve, and one mile away from the famed Floating Instrument Platform, or simply “FLIP.”

This 100 meter-long platform, used by Scripp’s Institute of Oceanography (SIO), is towed out to sea in a horizontal position, then actually flips upright, using its low center of gravity that extends under the water. FLIP is very stable, making it an ideal place for taking wave measurements. The FLIP is a bizarre piece of oceanographic equipment that, in the words of the SIO FLIP website, features “doors in the floor, portholes in the ceiling, tables bolted sideways to walls, [and] stairs leading to nowhere!” Dickey and his colleagues used FLIP for another experiment called the Optical Dynamics Experiment, or ODEX, under ONR funding (like RaDyO) back in 1982.

Dickey and his team chose this location near FLIP as a benign place with low winds and small waves. These mild conditions contrast to the second part of the experiment, to take place in August of 2009 just north of Hawaii, where high winds, high seas, and blue waters mark a starkly different environment. Here, south of Carpenteria, the Kilo Moana floats in well-sampled waters, where historical and routine physical, biological, and optical data can compliment the research that Dickey and his team are doing. Plankton thrives in these waters relatively close to shore, giving the ocean a green tint.

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Cruise, Day 1: The Adventures of an Aspiring Science Writer

Dolphins played in the tail waves as the Kilo Moana floated out to our destination, about eight miles south of Carpenteria. I saw three jump at once, all in a line, Sea World style.

I walk around with my camera bag and voice recorder, talking to the very friendly scientists about what it is they're doing. They're doing some cool stuff! Using very sophisticated instrumentation, they're taking advanced measurements that really only specialists can understand, but I'm going to try to make it discernible to the layperson.

My most difficult task, I fear, will be taking the overload of information and synthesizing it into a concise, understandable, yet interesting document.

Tonight I interviewed the head scientist, Tommy Dickey of the University of California at Santa Barbara, who gave me a crash course in what's going on and told me about his background in oceanography. All in all it took about two hours, and to be honest, I still don't quite understand it, but I reckon that's the reason these guys have post doctorates while I'm finishing my undergrad in liberal arts. (Hey, liberal arts are important too!)

Tommy Dickey has a full head of (one might say fluffy) hair and rocks back in his chair as he talks to me. Born in Farmland, Indiana, he dreamed of being a farmer as a child, but the Vietnam War took him elsewhere. After obtaining a bachelor's degree in physics, he knew that he was going to be drafted - so he joined the Coast Guard to do a humanitarian service for his country. As it turned out, oceanography was his passion, and he now deals with complicated (but cool!) things like ocean optics. There's more to the story than that, but I'll have to listen to my tape recorder first in order to synthesize it all.

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Day 1: Welcome Aboard!

Welcome aboard the Kilo Moana! All ashore! We're taking off.

Life on a ship is foreign to me. I'm currently feeling like a mess in no makeup and I'm trying to navigate a Macintosh. It took me a while just to find the "x" button.

Anyway. Here I will blog all about the RaDyO cruise from an outsider's perspective. My apologies for no links or pictures - I'll develop and post them after the cruise. Please check out my personal blog, Spilled Coffee, if you are interested.

I arrived on board yesterday afternoon and received a brief tour of the boat. Here they use words like galley and starboard, and dinner is at 1700. I bunk with a PhD student named Selda from Turkey who has all kinds of textbooks about light in water. That's what we're studying: radiance.

I admit I know nothing about radiance.

I admit that AP physics was among my least favorite classes in high school.

I admit that I was hoping we were studying something like dolphins or plankton or deep sea vents or even microscopic algae.

But light?

Then I talked with a couple of nerds scientists who told me about their rad equipment that can do things like measure just the very top surface of the water, and I started getting excited.

Then I remembered that media day was canceled, so I am their only means of documentation. Then I started fantasizing about getting this article published. Then somebody told me that next year the Kilo Moana is going to Hawaii (where it's from), and maybe I could come.

Light or no light, I started getting excited.

I ate a massive breakfast.

There is an endless supply of chocolate on board.

So maybe I look like a land-lover who over-packed - so maybe I get seasick - I've brought my notebook, camera, and Dramamine, and I'm ready to sail!

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