Abstract
This paper summarizes the glider activities carried out in the last 5 years by the IMEDEA Department of Marine Technologies, Operational Oceanography and Sustainability (TMOOS). TMOOS has been operating gliders in the Western Mediterranean Sea since 2006 and has set-up electronic and maintenance laboratories in order to establish a key glider port in the area. Twenty-two glider missions have been performed to date and over 17000 hydrographic and biogeochemical profiles collected. TMOOS is using gliders for operational, technological and scientific objectives. Studies of path planning analysis and adaptive sampling for gliders in combination with other platforms have been undertaken and new methodologies have been developed to process data from gliders. Thus far, IMEDEA gliders have contributed to the better understanding of mesoscale processes in the upper ocean, including the coupling between the physical and biogeochemical process of the marine ecosystem and, in combination with remote sensing observations, high-resolution glider data has enabled advances in new methodologies to improve coastal altimetry. Gliders have also proved to be important platforms for the development of operational oceanography tools and useful vehicles on which to test and implement new sensors for ocean monitoring.
Highlights
Gliders as a new component for ocean observing systemsGliders are small, autonomous, buoyancy-driven vehicles designed to sample the upper ocean (Stommel 1989)
SUMMARY: This paper summarizes the glider activities carried out in the last 5 years by the IMEDEA Department of Marine Technologies, Operational Oceanography and Sustainability (TMOOS)
A more detailed and specific processing chain is applied, including thermal lag correction, filtering, 1 m bin vertical averaging and computation of derived variables. It is worth mentioning the new methodology developed at IMEDEA for the thermal lag correction of conductivity data from the unpumped CTD sensors installed on Slocum gliders (Garau et al 2011)
Summary
Autonomous, buoyancy-driven vehicles designed to sample the upper ocean (Stommel 1989) They allow the autonomous and sustained collection of conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) and biogeochemical measurements (e.g. fluorescence, oxygen and turbidity), at a higher spatial resolution and lower cost than conventional methods. Commercially available gliders can operate between the ocean surface and 1000 m depth (shallow units to 200 m), but further research is ongoing to develop a prototype able to dive to 6000 m depth (Eriksen 2010). By modifying their buoyancy and making use of small fins, gliders sample the water column describing a zigzag trajectory between the surface and deep levels, with a horizontal speed of 25 to 40 cm s–1. A specific example of these joint operations was the successful recovery of a Slocum glider by a Search and Rescue diver operating from a helicopter in 2006
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