Hello and welcome to my new blog. As Emmanuel has requested I will post an entry every Friday about the weeks events/findings.

Early this week I finished, for the most part, comparing data from the WHOI dive logs to the data taken from the MVCO nodes. This was a good exercise in learning matlab, the amount of data taken by the MVCO nodes is enormous. Matlab was terribly confusing at first, but after working throught this data I have a good understanding of matlab.

That being said, my results are not what I expected. I expected taht the correlation between oceanic conditions and diver visbility would be obvious. When graphing teh data i see only weak trends. this leads me to believe that i may have made a mistake in matching the data up, or chaning the time in the dive logs from EST to GMT (I also took into account daylight savings time). However, I don't Believe this to be the case. One sign that my calculations are correct is that when divers were in the water at the MVCO site, the node was not logging data. this makes sense because the divers were making adjustments to the node. When matching the data I accepted the closest node reading within two hours of the dive start time. In some cases over 200 dives had no node reading whthin two hours, this leads me to believe my calculations are correct. Below is a graph of how the 12 meter nod readins deviate from the dive times.

In the dive logs visibility was rated A-E: A is 0-2, B is 3-10', C is 11-20', D is 21-40', and E is >50'. At the MVCO sight visibility was very rarely above C, and for the dives that visibility was higher then C there was no node data within two hours. Below is a graph of the distribution of visibility for all 929 dives done at the MVCO site in the last ten years.

The following two graphs are wave period and wave height over time, the color and shape of the data points describe the visibility.

I expected that visibility would be layered, with the best visibility occurring at low wave height and low wave period, and vise versa for the worst visibility. However, this is not the case. There is a large amount of data including numerous more graphs that show similar findings, that I am not going to post here. I will continue to see if I can make any conclusions based on the data I have.