The glider hits the curl, and will start to swing up riding the meander. I happy that I am not in these waters!! Check out the storm that passed through the system. This will require a nice bottle of wine being shared when we finish the mission, like we did in Paris with John Cullen when ICOOL concieved.

Glider Flight 100 Completed!!!

RU16 has successfully completed glider flight 100. In 24 days it flew 650 km from its place of birth on Cape Cod, MA to its new home in New Jersey. During its flight RU16 completed five cross-shelf and along-shelf sections, collected valuable physical and biological data about the whole Mid-Atlantic Bight during the spring transition time. The glider was recovered just off the coast of NJ near Tuckerton on April 6th, exactly as planned. Congratulations to the RU glider team for completing a perfect flight!

Here is the final dataset along the Endurance Line from the RU16 flight:

Almost there

RU16 is now flying toward Tuckerton along the endurance line. The mission is almost over, and it has been extremely successful so far. The temperature cross-section reveals lots of structure over the shelf. The data is very similar to the observations collected by RU01 about 3 days ago, indicationg that short-time variability is small right now.

Crossing fronts

RU16 is now moving toward the offshore end of the Rutgers University Glider Endurance Line. The glider crossed a strong temperature front (also seen in the sea surface temperature image from two days ago, see post below) and is now in surface rich chlorophyll waters. Once RU16 reaches the offshore waypoint, it will head onshore along the endurance line. RU01, the other glider currently in the waters of NJ, is already moving onshore along that line. RU16 will trail RU01 by about 4 days.

The crossing under the shipping lanes continues

The glider makes good progress as it heads under the last major shipping lane today and tonight. Hopefully tomorrow it will be smooth sailing on the open waters of the MAB. Interesting frontal boundaries, and as has been the case the last few days, lots of plants in the surface waters and non plant particles dominating the deeper water optical signals.

Approaching waypoint

RU16 continues to make solid progress toward the next waypoint. It will be there at sometime tomorrow.
The glider is almost over crossing a band of warm waters near the Hudson River Canyon. The warm waters are restricted to a thin band near the surface, as revealed by the glider observations. The variation near-surface salinity is much weaker. The chlorophyll concentration is high in the upper water column

Glider update

RU16 has been going back and forth along Eric Powell's fisheries transect for the last 3 days (see map below). It collected a total of 4 transects, which will give us information about short time variability in the hydrographic fields in the area. As soon as it hits the waypoint, it will head to the southwest toward the southern flank of the Hudson Shelf Valley.