First Meeting of the European Oceanic Microstructure Community

The purpose of our first meeting is initiation, networking and defining the core groups and the critical mass in the oceanic microstructure community in Europe. There has been considerable increase in interest in small-scale process studies, turbulence and mixing in ocean and natural waters. Expertise has developed in various groups scattered in different countries, using a variety of instrumentation and measurement platforms. Practices, deployments, data reduction and processing routines differ within groups. By establishing the European Oceanic Microstructure Community we aim to improve communication between different groups, increase awareness of each other’s capabilities and methods, and ultimately attempt to standardize out methods for most accurate and reliable data acquisition and processing. To this extend, we wish to combine expertise from all European microstructure groups to agree on a processing concept through organizing workshops and meetings.

In our first get-together, we invite you to join this initiative, and present a short overview of the capability of your institution to observe mixing in the ocean, a brief overview of measurement and processing methods with minimal preparation. In this informal meeting, we hope to identify a core group and formulate goals that may include the development of reliable, open-access community microstructure data processing software and the implementation of a communication and networking platform. We believe that this initiative will strengthen the scientific results from individual groups and increase visibility of 'European' oceanic mixing studies in the community.