Classification of Physico-Chemical Vertical Profiles in the Antarctic Ocean Using Elephant Seals as Samplers

Since a decade, marine mammals constitute valuable auxiliaries for operational oceanography. Starting with a collection of TSO profiles sampled along trajectories of equipped elephant seals cruising around Kerguelen Island (Antarctic Ocean), we propose a statistical method to construct a classification of the water masses. The originality of the proposed approach lies on the fact that the functional aspect of the data is included in the analysis as well as the multivariate aspect : each observation is a sampled profile of both temperature, salinity and oxygen. We highlight the importance of the oxygen profiles in the analysis especially when an animal crosses the Antarctic Polar Front. It is then possible to compare the vertical structure of the ocean to AVHRR images and the classification provides an interesting way to access meso-scale vertical structures of the Antarctic Ocean.