Category: ru29 (Page 17 of 22)

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

Hey All

As everyone enjoys an exciting St. Patricks Day weekend, Silbo has turned to the west, now setting his sights (for now) on the Caribbean.  With the strong partnerships we have formed there over the years, combined with the less than favorable currents we have been caught in, we will push the limits of this little guy yet again as we extend the distance of his excursion across the Atlantic in order to reduce the time strain.

With the first segment following the new way point we say about an 18% increase in the distance covered, and we hope that number continues to increase as we try and take more advantage of the northern flux that has plagued us for so long.

However down in the South Atlantic, Challenger is doing great as she continues to surf the tail current that makes up our north bound free way.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All

As the week goes on, Challenger continues to fly to the north amongst the mountains.  The way point, now due north is allowing us safe passage through the valleys of the sea mount-ain range that spans over 3000 km from Gough, Inaccessible, and Nightingale Islands in the South Atlantic, to the western coast of Namibia.

As we pursue this way point, we will progress north over the course of the upcoming weeks, before we begin to opt for lateral movement as we head west towards the islands of St. Helena and Ascension and set our sights on the equatorial current that Challenger will surf towards the norther shores of Brazil.

To the North, we are still in discussion on which direction we will take Silbo.  But looking to the RTOFS current velocities, it looks like if we want to begin making better progress, we should move the way point to the north and fly to the northern edge of the cold eddy.

As Silbo makes his way north around that eddy, it will buy us time as we decide where we will fly to to bring him back to tip top shape.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All!

As the title suggests, we are blasting Led Zeppelin tonight as Challenger flies north through the numerous sea mounts that stretch up into shallows.  Dave was able to create a very helpful kmz overlay highlighting the problematic areas that lie ahead.  With the location of the way point, and our proximity to the warm eddy to our north, it looks like we are set up nearly perfectly to to curl through the trouble areas as we continue our way to the north.

And to the North, Silbo is continuing to push along, making about 12 km progress per day.

As I had mentioned earlier, for the past week now, there has been a lot of discussion on where we should fly Silbo, as making our way south to the horn of Brazil is seeming to more difficult than we originally thought.  We ran some numbers over the past few days, and battery wise, we have roughly 290 days left.  If we were to continue to try and fly south returning to a progress of 6 km/ day and taking into account the degradation of our velocity due to growth on our hulls, we most likely would fall short of our goal.  However, if we were to our way point to the north west, we could make good progress as we take advantage of the current we have been fighting for months on end and shift our finish line to either the northern edge of Brazil, or, the lower Antilles such as Barbados.  These options are well within reach as we could potentially see speeds upwards of 20 km / day allowing us to arrive in mid to late July.

This discussion will continue as we arrive at a decision of where the most ideal place would be for a cleaning and rebattery for Silbo.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All!

Over the past week, our gliders have continued to push on wards as they make their way across the Atlantic Basins.

To the south, Challenger has been making some inspiring progress as she has flown nearly 200 km as she entered the southern end of the freeway I have mentioned in recent posts.

Yesterday, we issued Challenger a new way point, moving it from the north west to nearly due north, that way we can surf the warm core eddy that is dead ahead. The placement of the way point, we hope will allow us to keep us from being pushed too far to the east by the flux created by the eddy, effectively avoiding getting too close to the near by EEZ.

Another obstacle we must keep in mind is the mountain range that lies ahead.  At some points, these sea mounts actually reach from the dark depths of the Atlantic to nearly 200 m from the surface!  Because of this, we will be switching on the altimeter that way if we come near these shallow points, we will safely inflect before running aground.  The new way point however should steer us clear of any trouble areas.

Antonio’s 3D visualization of the Hycom forecast model also shows that the currents up until tomorrow will continue to to hold, providing confidence in our decision of the way point.

To our north, Silbo is still ‘turtling’ (as Antonio described) his away across the North Atlantic.  It has been over a month now that we have been pursuing the large warm core eddy to the south west and over 4 months since we have had evidence of a favorable current.

Taking this into account, there has been talk amongst our team of adjusting our path and veering  away from Brazil for the moment.  The most promising choice at the moment, is to move the way point to the north west, taking advantage of the current we have been fighting for 1/3 of the past year and heading towards Barbados and St. Thomas.  Here, Silbo can get a nice rest, a good cleaning, fresh anti biofouling coatings, and a new set of batteries, thus giving Silbo a fighting chance as we push to get around the horn and to the South towards Rio.  There will be more talk of this throughout the week and we will make sure to keep everyone posted.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All!

As winter storm Saturn pushes its way across the US, the global gliders continue to push on through some less than favorable currents.  However, Antonio and his team have provided us with a whole new interface to view them in: The CUBE

This new tool provides us with a 4-Dimensional representation of the the ocean models (shown here is the hycom model) giving us depths and forecasts up to +3 days.

Now lets zoom in:

From this view, we can see the warm eddy to our west that is causing the currents flowing to our east.  Tomorrow, Challenger will grab its new way point to the North West that will help us take the northern side of the eddy as we will soon shift gears to flying towards the north.

And in the North Atlantic, Silbo continues to push along as he heads towards the southern flow created by the warm eddy on the edge of this image

Hopefully soon we will begin to feel the effects of this eddy we have been chasing so we can make some good progress towards Brazil.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All

As we make our way through the weekend, our long duration gliders continue to make good progress.

In the South Atlantic, Challenger is continuing to kill it as she consistently flies over .35 m/s. In the near future, we will bump the way point out to the north northwest as the currents begin to turn northwards, leading to the freeway we will ride.  She is also now roughly 350 km from the subsurface mountain range that lies ahead.  When we get closer, we will begin to fly with the altimeter on just in case we encounter an area that is shallower than 1000 m.

And to the North, Silbo continues to make better progress as he flies to the South west.  Looking to the US model, it looks like we are not too far from the souther current.  According to the forecast, it looks like there may be a nice current we will be able to ride to the south east.

Finally, Antonio, Juan, Pep & Alex from ULPGC created something great: a 3D representation of the currents around Challenger. This will be a very cool tool to look to in the future for piloting.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All!

As the night comes to a close both gliders are continuing to make good progress as they push towards their way points.

To the north, Silbo is flying well with the way point provided by our student group.  In the past day he has covered nearly the same distance as he did in the previous two days!

Hopefully with this speed boost, we will soon catch up to the eddy to our south west and see the currents begin to swing around to the south.

And to the South, Challenger continues to fly as she is recording back to back speeds of  >12.5 km!

Tomorrow we will compare the out puts of the rtofs, myocean and possibly hycom models to see how much longer our way points will hold before we need to execute a change.

Force Wind Sea & Honor!

Hey All,

So today our family got a little bigger- a fresh new group of students joined Silbo’s cause!  Collin, Zach, Francesca, Kyle, Lawrence, Francesca, and Jeff today spoke with myself and Antonio and then sat down and picked a new way point, proposed it to Ben and the rest of the Silbo team, and then Ben fed Silbo their input.  As of this morning when these events occurred, Silbo was flying almost directly into the current, causing his progress to slow to about 7 km/day.  With the warm eddy just out of our reach to the south west, the new group picked a way point closer to the glider and to the west, hoping to close the angle between Silbo’s flight and the direction of the current.  This group will also be creating a comparison over the remainder of the semester in an attempt to validate the US and EU models.

To the south, Challenger continues to make good progress as she consistently records speeds of over 12 km/ ~10 hr segment. We will be keeping a close eye on her progress over the next couple days as we are flying down a small channel that looks like it has potential to give us some resistance if we drift too far to the west.  If this is the case we would have to steer further to the north in order to get around the small warm eddy in our vicinity as we surf towards the north running jet.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All!

As the weekend draws to a close, I just want to leave everyone with a quick update on the progress of the global glider fleet.

Flying the South Atlantic, Challenger continues to make good time.  As I mentioned last night, we moved the way point to the north west as we go against what the european model says and follow the US model.  We decided this was a better game plan as by taking this path, the worst case scenario is that we fly to the north west and maybe lose a little speed. The other plan would result in us possibly getting pushed south as we follow the cold eddy, and as Dave put it- why should we waist time flying in the wrong direction? Either way, this worst case scenario doesn’t seem to be the case as on her last segment, Challenger flew nearly .4 m/s!

To the North, Silbo continues to push onward towards the warm eddy to the south west. Looking to both models, Silbo shouldn’t have much longer until he starts feeling the effects of this eddy which we hope will soon begin showing southern, if not neutral currents giving us hope that this 4 month battle will soon be over.

Force Wind Sea & Honor