Hey all,
As everyone is preparing for a day full of turkey, stuffing, football, and a nice well deserved nap, silbo is continuing on his way from the Azores towards his home in the Canary Islands. Having been launched only 5 months ago (even though it seems like it has been an eternity) this little glider has flown over 3,600km and is finally on the home stretch towards completing the first part of this mission to go around the globe.
Since the kinks have been all worked out after last week, Silbo is now making pretty good progress as he makes his way over the last of the treacherous terrain back into the open ocean.
As we move further away from the shielding of the islands, we are now exposed to the elements more. As we can see from the above picture of the sea surface height and currents, we can see a number of eddies in the area, the red spinning in a clockwise manner and the blue turning counter to that. As we get closer, we will analyze what the currents are like past these eddies as we make a decision on where to put the way point.
And as always the sea surface temperature looks fascinating as we can see the temperature bands going from warm to cold towards the poles. As we get closer to the Canaries, we will see the temperature continue to rise as we enter the bands of green and yellow when we enter the more tropical waters near the Canaries. It will be interesting to see how deep the warm water goes and if this will effect the lack of biological growth we have seen thus far on silbo’s hull.
Finally, there has been a lot of talk lately on where we go from the Canaries after we have reached there. As our mission is to take silbo and the new Rutgers glider around the world, we have quite a few options of where to go.
There are a number of historical tracks we can follow, from Columbus to Elcano to making up our own path as we travel the globe. Currently a path zigzagging the atlantic and circling the antartic (shown above) along with a number of other paths are currently being discussed. But more on that later.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone
Lauren Conney, Antonio Ramos, and Nilsen Strandskov