A message from CARTHE director Tamay Ozgokmen at the conclusion of SPLASH:
I would like to congratulate everybody who has participated in SPLASH, because this was an experiment that was truly conducted from the heart! In particular, I congratulate the chief architect and executive scientist of the experiment, Dr. Jeroen Molemaker. SPLASH was very smooth, efficient and productive. I am impressed with how everybody took the bull by the horns, accepting a lot of responsibility and spending loads of energy and time, especially the students.
SPLASH completes 4 major CARTHE experiments (GLAD, SCOPE, LASER and SPLASH) in the past 5 years. There was a very healthy progress in observational development (drifters, X-band radar), dedicated aerial observations, highly coordinated and increasingly faster sampling teams, leveraged collaboration with other groups (JPL, IFremer, NOAA, etc.). CARTHE started as a mostly theoretical and modeling group and look at how far we have come! A lot of concentrated moneys were devoted to these experiments, and they were risky and we dared to push the envelope in all kinds of ways, but we can say we were successful!
With these major experiments behind us and data sets collected, we will be now entering a new phase of publishing the science and focusing on the dissertations for our graduate students. We have made a lot of investment in the next generation of scientists who were lucky enough to participate in these large “ocean games,” and I believe that the investment will pay off!
Congratulations again to everyone involved in SPLASH!