Less than a day after the disgruntled groundhog saw his shadow, delaying the end of winter for another 6 weeks, the mid-atlantic bight is getting hit with yet another snow storm, dumping between 8-12 inches of snow over New Brunswick where we call home.
Turning to the South Atlantic, Challenger is continuing to make good time as she is now roughly half way along the planned route from Ascension to Rio.
The models of the currents have even been found to be in agreement with each other:
while myocean shows a more sweeping pattern compared to the RTOFS eddies, both models show a pretty strong flux to the north west in our current location within the top 400m
MyOcean- blue 0m
RTOFS- yellow 0m
MyOcean- blue 300m
RTOFS- yellow 300m
MyOcean- blue 600m
RTOFS- yellow 600m
However as we dive deeper, the currents begin to stray from one another amongst the models
MyOcean- blue 900m
RTOFS- yellow 900m
Dark Blue- depth average currents
light blue- surface drift
According to the gliders calculations, visualized by Dave Aragon, overall the depth average current is to the north west while the surface drift was actually to the south west- most closely predicted by the direction of myocean which had the most southerly component to the westward vectors
Finally, Hilary Kennedy of the Challenger Society has invited us to be part of her display at Oceanology International the second week of March! We will join them at their booth March 11-13 as we promote education in ocean sciences and gain new friends of the Challenger Mission
Force Wind Sea & Honor