Hey All!
I just wanted to give everyone a quick update before the end of the day.
First off, it is official, Challenger has now flown over 2,000 km! As of the last surfacing, he had flown 2,000.48 meaning we are just short of being half way to the end zone!
We are now just about 900km from the Azores, and about another 1,100 km from our goal of the Canary Islands.
Zooming in, the slight change of way point we made this past weekend is effecting our flight very well. It prevented us from drifting to the east which we were trying to avoid. however, it looks like over the past few hours the currents have shifted.
Looking at the sea surface height image above from Antonio and ULPGC, it looks like we are teetering on the boarder of a small cold eddy (directly to our north) and a warm eddy to our south, which may explain the shift in currents. We expect to see the effects of the warm eddy to our south within the next surfacing or so which will then drag us back east.
The North South components map confirms our prediction as well if you look at the area we are in which is white meaning there is more of a northern flow (cold eddy) relative to our south east which has more of a southern flow (warm eddy).
Another interesting point, the sst looks quite groovy from today with a very interesting tie die pattern
From here we can see that we are still on the edge of a warm band where there are a number of eddies breaking off as the warm and cold waters clash thus causing a quite extensive eddy field on along the boarder.
Finally, it looks like Challenger is directly below a few bands of rain carried by the Jet Stream, possibly adding to the changing of the currents.
As always our friends, Force, Wind, Sea and Honor…
Nilsen & Antonio