Hey all,
This past weekend brought us some beautiful weather, but even more amazing news. Ben Allsup and Chris DeCollibus from Teledyne Webb Research have arrived in Ponta Delgada where they began their hard work to prepare Silbo for the next stretch of the mission.
Silbo with his new extended battery bay. Photo from Chris DeCollibus
For this next leg, Silbo has been modified to a stretch deep glider, meaning a second battery bay has been added to buy us extra time in the water on our way from the port of Ponta Delgada to the beaches of the Canary Islands. Over the past couple days, silbo has gone through a number of tests to make sure he is ready to tackle the remaining ~1350 km of this mission. While our team now in the Azores has been working on that, we have begun looking at the conditions for the deployment.
So far, we have two options for deployment: dropping silbo off along his track from last december or sailing east of Sao Miguel and heading south from there. The meteorological and marine forecast and boat availability will dictate which location we choose to deploy from.
Antonio gave us a detailed marine and atmospheric forecast highlighting windows for deployment. Our main window we plan to shoot for is between tomorrow, Tuesday 6th to Sunday 11th, where Antonio pointed out a long stretch of calm seas and nice weather with the most ideal conditions being on Friday 9th.
Next we looked at the bathymetry of the region to see where it will be deep enough to fly most efficiently.
In the bathymetry maps above, the blue color represents depths that are >1000m which allows Silbo to fly freely without us needing to turn on the altimeter, saving us battery.
If we can sail outside of the red circle prior to deployment, we should be able to fly to the full 1000m depth with no problem bathymetry wise. Next we look at currents from the hycom and ncom models.
Hycom Sea Surface Height & Currents
NCOM Currents from 3/3
NCOM Currents from 3/4
Both models above show a pretty strong current that wraps through the islands causing a cyclonic current around Santa Maria(Island to the south, center of the yellow eddy in the Hycom image). It looks like if we were to go the south east route, we would have to go pretty far out in order to avoid being pushed back into the archipelago. However if we go out to the east from Sao Miguel, we can ride this current to the east and then south around the warm eddy seen in the hycom picture. Evidence of this pattern is also seen in the currents & salinity google earth movies that Antonio sent out last month that showed a day by day evolution of the conditions from Jan 3 through Jan 28.
Finally, we have been keeping an eye on the ship traffic around the islands to make sure we don’t deploy silbo in the middle of a heavily traffic shipping lane. Our main tool for doing so is the AIS (Automatic Identification System) data provided by Localiza Todo which provides us with near real time images of what ships are where in the ocean with forecasts of where the ships will be over the next hour.
The red circle is Ponta Delgada and we’re roughly 1,400km from the blue skies and sandy beaches of the Canary Islands; yet as you can see, the road won’t be easy. Although we’re still a ways away from our destination, countless ships are in our way; but as we get closer, we’ll determine how to slip past them.
Zooming in on the Azores, Sunday afternoon was pretty slow with very little movement to the south east of Sao Miguel.
Ship Traffic Afternoon of March 4
However, this morning the area is looking much more lively so we may want to sail a bit further out of the way to make sure Silbo doesn’t experience any close encounters that could potentially end the mission all together.
Ship Traffic Morning of March 5
Given this information, we will continue discussing what we want to do and will soon make a decision on where and when we will deploy. We will leave you with a truly inspirational photo taken by Ben Allsup of Silbo during one of his tests.
Check back soon for more updates
Force Wind Sea & Honor
Nilsen, Antonio & Oliver