And finally ....

The cruise finished on schedule on the 3rd June and the next scientific cruise is now underway on the RRS James Cook.  Overall 96% of the data that we had hoped for was recovered from the RAPID array of moorings.  A figure with which we were very pleased.  We are very grateful to everyone on board: officers, crew, technicians and scientists who all worked together to achieve this result.

Before we left the ship we were able to make our first preliminary estimate of the 26°N AMOC time series from October 2012 to March 2014.   There was much excitement amongst the scientists on board as Ben completed the calculation and showed us the preliminary results.     All of the data now needs to checked carefully and we need to incorporate the data from our colleagues in Miami.  After this is done the complete calculation of the new times series will be made public on our website, probably by the end of September.

However, we can now announce the winner of our competition to estimate the value of our preliminary calculation for the period from 1st October 2012 to 30th September 2013 (Please note the final value will be different once  we incorporate data from our colleagues in Miami).      The entries are summarised in the figure below.    Estimates ranged from 15.1 Sv to 19.4 Sv with an average of 17.2 Sv.  So most of you thought that it would be a little less than the long term average (17.5 Sv).

Distribution of entires (red) compared with the annual averages from
the eight years starting from April 2004.  The distribution of annual averages
has been normalised to enable the comparison.

 - Third place was Stuart Cunningham 17.0 Sv

 - Joint second were Sarah Hughes and the Master of the RRS James Cook Peter Sarjeant with 16.7 Sv

 - But one person estimated the exact value of 16.5 Sv.   Well done Bablu Sinha!