Dr. Dave Rainey and Mr. Mick Leary, BP, Houston, Texas For months, the efforts of a diverse team of scientists, technologists, and engineers to cap the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico and minimize the effects of the spill have been top of the news agenda worldwide. While the spill is no longer in the news, the team continues to work toward understanding the incident so that measures can be taken to prevent similar events in the future.

Martin G. Scharffenberg MIT, Cambridge Geostrophic surface velocity anomalies are used to analyze the variations of the large-scale geostrophic currents and of the Eddy Kinetic Energy (EKE) field of the ocean circulation. Using SSH measurements of the Jason-1 - TOPEX/Poseidon (JTP) tandem mission it has been possible for the first time to calculate the zonal and meridional geostrophic velocity components separately without the assumption of isotropy, and the resulting EKE subsequently along the satellite track for each along-track position.