What do you do if you want to measure the properties of water in realtime?  Take out your portable Underway Data Aquisition System (UDAS), of course!  This week’s photo comes from Physical Ocenography student Tanya Novak.    Tanya drove the boat pictured above in a back-and-forth transect in Monterey Bay with her UDAS in tow,  trying to characterize the water that flows from the mouth of Elkhorn Slough.

That UDAS contains a whole suite of impressive-sounding instruments:  a thermosalinigraph, to take automated measurements of temperature and salinity, a transmissometer, which measures the fraction of light transmitted through the water (to determine water clarity), a fluorometer which measures fluorescence (the light emitted from chlorophyll in phytoplankton), and an ISUS, or In-Situ Ultraviolet Spectromter, which measures the amount of nitrate in the water.

What do you get when you put all those measurements together? Click here to see the plume Tanya traced (and the information she collected) on the MLML public data portal.  Thanks for the photo, Tanya!