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

Hey All

So this week we have seen a pretty interesting shift in the accuarcy of the ocean models we have been using as our road maps for the missions.  For the past few days now, the US model has more accurately depicted the northward flow of the currents recorded by Challenger than the European model has done. With this news, our team has decided to modify our path strategy from what we had previously. Early last week, our plan was to follow the red path outlined below: to keep our way point to the west and ride our way around the cold eddy and find ourselves on the other side prepared to enter the strong northern freeway located to our north. However, we have decided to run an audible and follow what the RTOFS model is showing and try for a north west bearing.  This afternoon we put in a new way point and we hope we will see ourselves make some strong progress with the direction of the currents that Challenger is confirming when she surfaces.

To the north, Silbo continues to push onward as he strives for the southern currents of the mystical warm eddy to the south west.

Here, the US model shows the eddy a little further away than the European model has shown, but both show the formation of the strong southern flux that we hope to soon catch and ride south towards the equator!

Force Wind Sea & Honor

As Challenger continues to make good progress to the west-north west, Dave has continued to analyze the compass and flight statistics of our glider.  As I have mentioned over the past few weeks, we have had a few issues with our steerings routing from a problem with the compass.  Dave Aragon has been working since the beginning fine tuning the flight parameters to get ourselves flying as well as possible.  There is one limitation to completely solving the problem; we are operating with low power mode set to 30 s interval so any unfavorable movements don’t get corrected for until the computer clicks on every 30 s, sometimes leading to overcorrection.  So tomorrow we will run a test flying Challenger at full throttle to see to what extent Dave has eradicated the problem.

While we run the test and through the weekend, Challenger wil continue to pursue the western set way point as we try and cut across the weakest point of the southern flux immediately next to us as we head towards the opposite side of the eddy that leads into the ‘free way’ we will cruse along in the near future.

To the North, Silbo continues to force his way south as the north west current tries to defer his progress resulting in a more lateral movement that we would hope.  Although it may take a little longer, Silbo either way is flying towards the large warm eddy to the south west which will provide the strong southern jet that will carry us south.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Today, our growing fleet hit another mile stone while building towards the completion of the Challenger mission: flying over 10,000 km.  Combined, SIlbo and Challenger have been at sea for 490 days yet we are just getting started.

Down in the Southern Atlantic off the coast of Namibia, Challenger has made a discovery.  After nearly a month of being spot on, the european myocean/mercator ocean model is showing a discrepancy when compared to the depth average currents of Challenger.  However, just in the nick of time the US RTOFS model has stepped up and is showing currents much more similar to that of the glider. A major sigh of relief however is that both models show the strong northern current to our west that we have based our plan of northern progress off of.

To the North, Silbo continues to push onward, forcing his way towards the patch of neutral current that then gives way to the massive southern flux of the eastern side of the warm eddy.

Both the myocean (above) and geoeye/seastar (below)data sets show Silbo is closing in fast on these southerly currents.  Although progress has been slow once we penetrate the jet, we hope to have a nice tail current pushing us along after a very long uphill battle.

Finally I just wanted to leave everyone with the Salinity field for today that Antonio put together from the geoeye/seastar dataset.  In this map we not only can see the super fresh water to the west of the Amazon run off, but we can see the jets to the south that we hope to ride out in the coming weeks.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey All

The tests continue for Ru29 as we formulate our plans to make her mission a success.  This evening, we moved the way point to the north west to see how the heading error and fin movement are affected by our compass issues given a heading of 300˚.

A second test we are continuing is that of diving deep.  Checking out the new kml created by Chip which displays the temperature at the bottom of our inflections and shows the temp profile when selected, we can see that the thermocline is at roughly 100m depth.  The past week or so we have been making our top inflections at this depth to get a measure of how much energy this would draw rather than going all the way to the surface.  So far we have seen nearly no change in energy draw and thus we are lowering the inflection depth to 125m that way we can completely avoid the thermocline and available sunlight, thus depleting any biological growth of its necessary resources.

To the North, Silbo just surfaced a few minutes ago and with some quick work by Ben, we were able to get a new way point in.  The new way point is to the east of the previous one, to make a stab at flying more south than west as we have been over the past few days.

This will prevent us from flying into the two miniature eddies directly to our west and dive to the south to try for the arrows that will carry us towards the strong southerly jet in the bottom left corner of the screen.

Force Wind Sea & Honor

Hey all

Throughout the day, Challenger has continued to chase the current seen in the Mercator European model depicting a strong flux to the west.  Although the model doesn’t completely agree with what Challenger is recording (very faint southerly current) she continued to make good progress towards the way point.  Tomorrow we will give her a new way point back to the north west so we dont get dragged too far south as we round the edge of the warm core eddy

Similarly. tomorrow I plan to propose a new way point to the Silbo team suggesting a way point shift to the south.  Looking to the map above,  if we continue to follow the current path towards the way point, we run the risk of hitting the wrong side of the eddy we have been chasing.  With a way point shifted further to the south, we also will reduce how Silbo is being pushed to the west and hopefully shift that progress in the southern direction.

Force Wind Sea & Honor