The mid-atlantic autumn cold pool during GliderPalooza-2013

Abstract

During the autumn of 2013 the Mid-Atlantic Regional Association Coastal Ocean Observing System (MARACOOS) - under the auspices of the NOAA Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) - coordinated the shelf deployments of nine ocean gliders between Nova Scotia and Georgia in an exercise called GliderPalooza 2013. This paper describes the use of four of those gliders to map the September 2013 Cold Pool in the - the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB). The Cold Pool is a swath of distinctive, highly-variable, bottom-trapped, cold water mass found during summer over the mid and outer continental shelf between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras; and a dominant component of the summer MAB habitat. During September, three of the gliders each occupied a pair of cross-shelf transects extending beyond the shelfbreak south of the New England, off New Jersey, and off Maryland respectively; while the fourth patrolled inside of the 30m isobath off New Jersey. The spatially variable Cold Pool was defined at each cross-shelf glider transect in terms of its temperature departure (TD) relative its particular section-minimum temperature Tmin; or for TD <4°C. We found that the loci of Tmins or Cold Pool core, was just inshore and offshore of the shelfbreak in the eastern and western MAB, respectively. The inshore Cold Pool boundary varied between the 20m and 40m isobath alongshelf, while the offshore boundary generally was beyond the shelfbreak in association with the shelfbreak front.