FALL RIVER, Mass., — September 30, 2013 — Ocean gliders are so good at accumulating information that multiple tasks can be accomplished on one mission. UMass Dartmouth physical oceanographer Wendell Brown, the lead scientist for the university's ocean glider mission, is looking for temperature and other measurements to gain a fuller understanding of the Mid-Atlantic cold pool, a lens of cold, dense winter water that settles onto an area of the ocean bottom between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras and remains isolated from seasonal warming until late summer-early fall storms begin mixing the coastal waters.
Thirty miles out to sea, Ray Rock swung the Lucky Lady around hard and headed west. Hunched over his laptop, ocean glider pilot Chris Jakubiak shouted out the last four digits of an 11-digit GPS coordinate, then hustled across the cabin to stare out at the sea.
"That boat is right where we want to be," Rock said, glancing down at his GPS screen and pointing to where a big fish dragger, with long mantislike stabilizer arms spread wide, towed a net right through the area where the torpedo-shaped glider should be waiting for them.
Four more sets of eyes stationed around the boat also searched the water hopefully, trying to ignore the flash of whitecaps, or the occasional floating gull or lobster buoy, reminding themselves that they were looking for a patch of lemon yellow, the tail of an electric ocean glider, owned and operated by UMass Dartmouth, that had been out to sea for 21 days traveling the ocean on a 250-mile triangular route gathering scientific information.
It was one of 12, and as many as 16, such robot gliders scheduled to be in the water from early September to late October. The gliders run programmed routes from Nova Scotia to Georgia assessing ocean conditions at the height of hurricane season in an effort led by Rutgers University's Coastal Ocean Observation Lab, under the pop-inflected banner Glider Palooza 2013.
Read the full story at the New Bedford Standard-Times