Probably the largest feat of the Challenger Glider Mission was achieved this week, as our budding fleet reached not only the 1,000th day at sea, but also flew the 20,000th km!
The Challenger Fleet has now succeeded in flying from the polar waters off of Iceland down to the tropical waters of the Caribbean in the North Atlantic and spanned the South Atlantic bridging Cape Town South Africa to the waters of Brazil by way of Ascension Island.
Taking a quick look at 29’s progress, she is continuing to cruise through the eddy we discussed in the previous post.
Over the past couple of days, the eddy has migrated to the North, its strong southern region seemingly pushing us off course a bit as it moves through. Contrary to that, RTOFS is showing a better developed eddy who’s center is to our south, it’s strong side being the northern edge that also aligns with the dip in our path.
Another major event that occurred today was the final presentations for the Ocean Observatory Class- a course taught each semester by the founders of the Center for Ocean Observing Leadership, Scott Glenn Oscar Schofield and Josh Kohut where a class of ~60 students break up into tiger teams to create their own research projects to pursue throughout the semester. The final for the course is a research symposium held in the lobby of the Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences where a special guest comes to review the student’s research. This semester, Dr. John Manderson of NOAA attended as the featured guest and joined a number of IMCS faculty and staff in learning of the progress the students made over the course of the semester. Click here to see some of the research conducted. View photos from the symposium
Dr Manderson watches as a group of students demonstrates their semesters research