Greetings all,
First off, hope everyone had a great Fourth of July! Now back to the Challenger Mission.
Although fighting against the storm has slowed us down, we’re still persevering. Luckily the aftermath of last week’s storm has left us currents flowing to the Southwest as opposed to last week’s currents of directly West. But there is an eddy to our West so we must be mindful of that as we approach the favorable currents. The image to the left depicts our total progress so far with a temperature overlay and the image on the right shows the eddy to our west and the Southwestern currents a little ways away from us with a sea surface height overview.
The following image is from stormpulse.com and shows that Silbo has braved the storm and is more or less “out of the frying pan,” since that large cloudy band is now to our East.
This massive storm is what has caused the currents to be so unpredictable over the past week, where we were seeing the currents make full 180° shifts every few hours, rendering our 24 hr models unreliable. Over the weekend when we were hit with a majority of the storm, we saw the strongest effects of the shifting currents as our distance covered per surfacing had huge ranges, going from about 6 km to almost 12! But now that the storm has passed and the skies are clear (for now) we are more consistent.
Unfortunately, the storm left us back with currents heading West, out into the mid Atlantic. Although better than a strait on head current, we are still doing quite a bit of fighting as Challenger 1 tries to correct the amount the glider drifts while trying to get to its way point. To try and help us decrease the amount to which we are fighting the currents and to increase our speed, we are shutting current correction off. Hopefully this will allow us to go a little more with the current, thus increasing our speed as we fly less directly into the currents pushing us out to the west.
Oliver & Nilsen