Hey All

This semester, I have made the leap transitioning to being a lecturer for the Ocean Observatories course that I took every semester under Scott Josh and Oscar for 4 years beginning with the fall semester of RU 17.  And in helping with the class, I have built a model comparison tool that takes the data from both Challenger and Silbo and compares it to the data provided to us by the ocean models we have utilized as our road maps.  These models not only provide us with the direction of the currents, but also have temperature and salinity.

 

One observation we have made now that we are tracking the comparisons, is that it seems that the models are underestimating the temperatures at depth; not fully capturing the temperature transfer at depth in the vertical direction.  This could potentially skew the results of forecasts made based off of this data for such cases as climate change and other cases dependent on similar data.  To aid with this, the data from Silbo and Challenger is now being fed back into the models to hopefully aid in the accuracy as we provide data points that were not previously available.

A few days ago, Silbo suffered from another mysterious reset at depth, followed by an increase in movement by the pitch battery- with little trace of why this is occurring   After analyzing the data, the movement of the battery is still not completely known, however our friends up at TWR have been able to lock it down and reduce the movement.  This has allowed Silbo’s spike in energy usage to level off returning the estimate on how much energy remains into next year; well past our estimated date of arrival in the Caribbean in mid summer.

Challenger is continuing to fly well, however, we seem to have found a small eddy that is rotating against our favor, effectively slowing us down.  Over the next couple days, we will continue to explore this anomaly and make a decision as to where to go from here.

Force Wind Sea & Honor