Navy Gliders View the Cold Pool

Two Navy gliders were deployed in the Middle Atlantic Bight (MAB) between September 11 & 26, 2019. Their cross-shore trajectories were planned to capture the cold pool, a cold bottom layer of water that characterizes the MAB at this time of the year. There transects are shown below.

In the figures below, the top figure shows the cross-shore temperature transect for glider ng618. In this figure the cold pool can be identified as the bottom water with temperature less than 10 degrees Celsius. The cold pool has important implications for the fisheries of the region and it can become a “fire extinguisher” for tropical cyclones by lowering the sea surface temperature through vertical mixing during the passage of a storm.

The bottom figure shows the same ng618 glider trajectory from the Global Ocean Forecasting System (GOFS 3.1) that is a global operational ocean model run by the US Navy. The comparison between glider observations and the GOFS model are remarkably good.