Hey All!
I just wanted to leave everyone with a quick update on our global gliders and their progress for the weekend.
Silbo is still fighting his away along through the middle of the North Atlantic, suffering from the continuous North-East flux we have seen for a while now.
However, yesterday we gave him a new way point to the west to try and see if we can find these western currents that we have been seeing in the models. During the way point change we also saw something of interest, as Silbo did a single yo down to only a few hundred meters, and when he surfaced, he reported currents running in a similar direction to what the models have been reporting. This means that subsurface there seems to be a large Northern flux that cancels out what we see on the surface and has been impeding Silbo’s progress. Soon I hope to be able to plot up subsurface currents to see if we can get a clearer picture of what is going on. From there we may be able to see more favorable routes that will get us out of this head current once and for all!
Down in the South Atlantic, Challenger is making her way off the shelf and into deeper waters, allowing her to now dive to the full 1000m potential of the deep pump.
As we make our way out into the deep water, we have been making adjustments to various parameters as we prepare for the long flight ahead. For the moment, we are only collecting data on the first yo of each dive collecting at a rate of once every 12 seconds resulting in roughly 1.5 m resolution in our data.
As for the new way point Dave gave to Challenger over the past couple days, it looks like it may work very nicely as we have started to head into the outer reaches of the warm core eddy to our south west. If we play our cards right, Challenger will hopefully continue to stay towards the edge of this eddy and fly more west than south as we head towards international waters, but we will update tomorrow afternoon.
Force Wind Sea & Honor!