Hi Mandy,

Thank you for the feedback. After finding out more about the plans for next year, we need to change our response to the following:

 
1. Considering the potential failure or termination of MARS, how dependent is this project and related work on its continued availability?

MARS offers such rapid testing and improvement capabilities that its termination would slow planned SES developments. If MARS were taken offline, we would request more mooring deployments, requiring more ship time and batteries than we currently use.
 
2. The 2026/27 ENSO is indeed intensifying—would additional support (i.e., beyond that requested) enhance your program in ways that could exploit this event?
 
We are pushing to recover/redeploy the SES on the upcoming CFE lab Packard cruise, and then recover/redeploy again on the CFE lab cruise in spring 2027 (It is currently scheduled for deployment only on that cruise). This would mean delaying some of our trigger trap/SES development goals, but we are all on board with doing that given the science opportunity to study this event. To do this we would need the following for 2027:

ship time (1 more day):
-extend the spring 2027 CFE lab Packard cruise from 3 days to 4 days

expenses ($16200):
-batteries ($13000) (we have some spares we can use, so this is less than the usual deployment cost)
-an additional round of ballast ($1000)
-one more strongback ($2200)

labor (M-tech to join on CFE lab cruise):
-Our turnaround in 2027 will be more involved than the bare-bones one we will do at sea in 2026. We will need additional help with that. Depending on who the CTD tech is, it might be possible to enlist their help, but we should be prepared in case that's not possible. Please see changes to Ben Jansen's time in Milestone 2.

3. Unfortunately, all of engineering is impacted, and we need to make cuts to balance the workload on each engineer. As such, we need to cut hours for Irene, Denis, and Rich. We suggest postponing milestone 2. Please adjust the labor hours in Adaptive accordingly.

We will make most of these changes, though will need to add some more time for a M-tech to help us turn around SES/TT on the 2027 cruise (see above). We hope to retain 30 hours of Denis's time and $15k of the expense budget (down from $30K originally requested) to maintain momentum and make some progress on the optics work needed for this development.

Labor changes for Milestone 2 are now:
- Irene- delete 150 hours
- Rich- Delete 160 hours
- Denis- Delete 90 hours (keep 30 hours)
- Ben- Delete 150 hours, reassign 50 hours to Spring 2027 cruise

 
4. Are there alternatives to the $40K modem?
 
I wish! Every time this comes up we lament the lack of options. Other than buying a new modem, our options are the following:

- go without a spare modem: Very risky. We've had modem issues over the years, and spares have been critical. We are currently using a very old spare.

- get our recently-flooded one serviced and use that as a spare: Irene has been trying for many months to get through to Benthos to get a quote for this, hoping it might be cheaper than buying new, with no luck.

- if you know of better options, please let us know!

Thank you,
Crissy





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