Hey all,
So as we shuffle through the remnants of a record breaking snow storm and get our costumes ready for the mystical holiday of Halloween, Challenger continues on his epic journey.
After a successful rendezvous mission off the coast of Terceira, where a team of scientists went out to do an ocular inspection of our inspirational little robot, we found that after over 126 days at sea there was no significant biological growth on the exterior that would be detrimental to the remainder of the mission. This is truly incredible as during the 27 Trans Atlantic mission there was a significant amount of growth that slowed us down to the status of a drifter.
Now that we are on our way out of the archipelago, the next thing we need to keep an eye on is the bathymetry and currents to make sure we can cut back to the east so we can get back into consistently deep water on our way to the Canary Islands. Looking at geomapapp, it looks like if we continue in our eastward fashion until about 24˚W we should be able to keep from running aground.
Once we get around these obstacles, it looks like we may be free of any restrictions of how deep we can fly
Next, looking at the currents, there is the Azores Current which has a general East-SouthEast flow from the Azores right towards the Canary Islands. Although we may have to fight it a bit to continue east until we are away from the shallower depths, this flow will hopefully aid us on the final leg of this mission and help up conserve some battery.
The Azores current is the tail end of the Gulf stream that breaks off to the south as massive current runs into the European and African continents.
Now zooming into the immediate area of the glider, we are experiencing a storm that has to have pushed us up into the high 40’s (I have lost count).
This has started to notably shift the direction of the currents from North West to the North and now back towards the west.
Looking at the surface currents, we are just to the west of a few warm core eddies that are causing currents that may drag us up to the North East as we move out East past the bad bathymetry. Once we get out to about where those eddies are positioned, we will move the way point south and turn our nose towards the Canary Islands.
Finally the Sea Surface Temperature data from ULPGC looks amazing as we are on the cusp of another strong band of temperature gradient as we get closer to the tropical waters of the more southern region of the North Atlantic.
We will post again soon with further updates
As always Force Wind Sea and Honor
Nilsen & Antonio