MIAMI – As Hurricane Isaac barreled toward New Orleans, a team
led by University of Miami (UM) Professor and Deep-C (Deep Sea
to Coast Connectivity in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico) Co-
Principal Investigator Nick Shay was planning NOAA's P-3
aircraft missions to fly into the storm. Dr. Benjamin Jaimes and
UM graduate students Jodi Brewster and Ryan Shuster prepared and
loaded 39 profilers into the plane. Their goal: to drop these
profilers into the storm at optimum locations where they could
collect measurements of ocean heat content, salinity and
currents during the hurricane. "We wanted to collect data from
the DeSoto Canyon area where the Deepwater Horizon incident
occurred, so we could capture the upwelling as it was
occurring," said Shay, who is an expert on the Loop Current and
regularly studies weather in this region. "We used operational
products that we developed for NOAA's National Environmental
Satellite Data and Information Service (NESDIS) to study the
warm and cold core eddy ahead of the storm to e