RRS Discovery Cruise 253, 04 May-20 Jun 2001. Faeroes, Iceland, Scotland Hydrographic and Environmental Survey (FISHES)

The FISHES 2001 cruise, RRS Discovery Cruise 253, was split into two legs. A large scale CTD survey of the Iceland Basin and Rockall Trough was carried out during the first and longer leg, 4 May – 21 May. The second leg, 1 June – 20 June, concentrated on repeated high resolution SeaSoar surveys of the Iceland Faeroes Front (IFF). A wide range of measurements were made alongside each scale of physical survey techniques used for the two legs of the cruise. These ranged from traditional biological sampling using net hauls to fast repetition fluorometric techniques for the underway determination of primary productivity parameters. Deck phytoplankton incubation experiments under controlled light environments involved both the usual measurements of N15 uptake and measurements of Si32 uptake. During the second leg of the cruise, a regional multi-disciplinary process model was used to forecast observations in near real-time.