As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, after a discussion with our team last week, Silbo is now headed towards the Caribbean. By making this move, we are hoping that we will be able to take advantage of the northern flux we have been fighting for months now, along with the force of the southern edge of the north atlantic gyre.
For the moment, Silbo is just slowly gaining speed, as it seems that as we moved the way point, we entered the influence of a large cold core eddy, thus producing a current that continues to push silbo 90˚ to where we are trying to fly:
However as Silbo continues to pursue the caribbean way point to our west, we should begin to feel the north west current.
To the south, today we gave Challenger a new way point. Now that we are free of the treacherous bathymetry we moved the way point far out to the North West as begin to approach the island of St. Helena.
We are also looking forward to seeing the results of what the steering looks like. Below is a plot of the heading error standard deviation. Within the past few weeks, we can see that the std dev has rose from about 7 to 12. This is due to the error in our compass that appears when we face to the north. By turning more to the west, this should reduce the prominence of this erros allowing Challenger to fly better. We will update again soon with the progress of our gliders as they trek across the Atlantic
Force Wind Sea & Honor