Rutgers’ underwater gliders keep a watchful eye on NJ’s water quality NEW BRUNSWICK – Thousands of New Jersey residents will soon head out to the beach as summer quickly approaches. But how can they be sure that the ocean water they are swimming in is clean and safe? Cue a piece of equipment from Rutgers University. Rutgers and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection have been teaming up for years to monitor New Jersey’s oceans using underwater gliders. “It’s a water quality mission. So, these gliders are equipped with sensors that measure everything from temperatures, to the salinity of the water, to more specific water-quality issues like how much dissolved oxygen is in the ocean,” says Rutgers Marine and Coastal Sciences professor Josh Kohut. The gliders are programmed for missions that usually last about two hours. They are completely autonomous and have to rely on ocean currents to move. “When they sit at the surface, instead of turning on a propeller and diving, they’ll acutely pull seawater into the nose,” Kohut says. The glider monitoring station at Rutgers Cook Campus looks similar to NASA’s mission control. Several large paneled screens show all the data collected by the gliders, such as current direction, water temperature and depth – as well as storm surge, a very important factor during hurricanes. “We can use these robots to protect our coastline and understand what the ocean is going to do for storm intensity in the future,” says Kohut. Officials say that the gliders have become more involved in weather prediction ever since Superstorm Sandy. Article Credit: http://newjersey.news12.com

The R/V Arabella returned Monday May 20th to the RUMFS boat basin after being dry-docked for years due to inability to access docks due to siltation. Recent dredging over the winter has allowed for dock access with 10ft depths.

Dr. Hugh Roarty met with students from the Marine Academy for Science and Technology (MAST, Monmouth County) and Marine Academy of Technology and Environmental Science (MATES, Ocean County) to discuss possible collaborations on the use of drone technology for lifesaving operations and environmental monitoring. On the trip to MAST he was accompanied by Mr Sam Coakley, MAST graduate from 2014 and current Rutgers graduate student, who spoke to the students about his current research on the use of gliders to measure ocean mixing during hurricanes.

Professor Travis Miles gave a NOAA Planet Stewards Webinar on Monday, May 13 titled Hurricanes & Robots: How New Technology is Changing the Way We Study and Predict Extreme Storms. NOAA Planet Stewards welcomed Dr. Travis Miles, Assistant Professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences as their featured speaker this month. Hurricanes are one of the deadliest and costliest natural disasters in the world. Our ability to predict where storms will make landfall has improved steadily, but it is still a challenge to predict a storms intensity or strength. Robots patrolling our coastal oceans are providing new opportunities to improve hurricane intensity forecasts and inform better response plans. In this talk you’ll learn how these heroic robots swim and survive into the eye of the storm to keep us safe. Watch the complete archived video below!

A researcher’s decision to put an underwater drone in Hurricane Irene’s path is helping to transform the science of hurricane intensity prediction. Jan Ellen Spiegel | UNDARK.org In August 2011, with Hurricane Irene bearing down on the mid-Atlantic coast, Scott Glenn, an ocean engineering researcher at Rutgers University, made a bold decision. While most other research teams moved their ships, personnel, and expensive hardware to safety ahead of the hurricane, Glenn left his data-collecting drone — a torpedo-shaped underwater “glider” about 6 feet long and worth about $150,000 — directly in its path. Because that remote-controlled glider survived Irene — much to the relief of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, which technically owned it — it may have helped to change the science of hurricane intensity prediction. Hurricanes are considered atmospheric storms even though they can’t live without drawing fuel from warm ocean water. While scientists have long known that hurricanes leave the ocean below them substantially cooler as they pull up energy from warm water, forecast models have long assumed that ocean conditions are slow to change and therefore factor them in as constants rather than driving factors in determining a storm’s strength. But Glenn challenged that assumption when his drone detected a rapid and sharp drop in ocean temperature ahead of Irene’s eye that coincided with a decrease in the storm’s intensity just before it hit the New Jersey shore. He confirmed that discovery in reverse 14 months later when a rise in water temperature as Hurricane Sandy approached the same New Jersey shore coincided with an increase in the storm’s intensity. “It’s very simple,” Glenn says. “If the ocean’s warm, it increases intensity. If the ocean’s cool, it decreases intensity. So if you want to get the intensity right, you have to get the ocean right.” If Glenn is correct, and data like his can be made available to meteorologists and researchers in a timely way, it could dramatically improve the accuracy of hurricane intensity forecasting, which has barely budged in recent years even as track forecasting has gotten better by orders of magnitude. It could also benefit emergency agencies, particularly in cases where residents have ignored warnings because previous forecasts were overblown. “It makes all the sense in the world,” says Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts who specializes in Arctic climate change and how that affects weather patterns in the middle latitudes. Until recently, Francis worked in the same department as Glenn at Rutgers, but she conducted no joint research with him. “This really key factor is probably going to offer a big step forward in doing a better job with intensity forecasting,” Francis said. Hurricane Irene’s approach — the red dotted line represents the eye of the storm — was blunted as it departed from heated surface waters (the reds to the left of the eye) and encountered cooler waters (right of the red line) ahead of landfall. Visual: Glenn et al., Rutgers University Until drone gliders came along, forecasters had no way of knowing what was going on below the ocean surface during a storm. Unlike the hurricane-hunter aircraft that fly into and around storms, it’s too dangerous to leave ships in their path to take measurements. And satellites — which can only measure surface temperatures under the best of conditions — can’t detect anything through storm clouds. Glenn and other ocean researchers have been using underwater gliders since around the turn of the millennium, recording data like temperature and salinity over deep and large areas not otherwise easily accessible. The gliders have no engine. They use a battery to operate a pump system that sucks in water to shift weight to make them move up and down in the water at about half a mile an hour. An inflatable bladder allows the tail of the glider to surface and transmit some of its information by satellite, making it readable in close to real time on monitors virtually anywhere. The battery also operates the glider’s computer, instruments, and satellite communications and can last for months. At the time of Irene’s approach, Glenn was measuring water quality when he decided to leave his glider in place to collect further readings during the storm. His data, which wasn’t fully analyzed until afterward, showed the water temperature dropped 6 to 11 degrees Celsius in the hours before Irene’s eye passed through. “We saw that there was a big change,” says Glenn, who is a distinguished professor in the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences and co-director of the Center for Ocean Observing Leadership at Rutgers. “Most of the literature talks about the cooling that happens after the hurricane passed,” he says. In this case, “the eye’s not even there yet and it’s already cooled. That was new.” Not only that, the forecast that Irene would reach the New Jersey coast as a Category 1 storm turned out to be wrong — it hit instead as a tropical storm, one category weaker than predicted. The mid-Atlantic region where Irene came ashore, along with a few other regions around the world such as the Yellow Sea, have dramatic seasonal ocean temperature swings and a clearly defined “cold pool,” or reservoir of cold water that sits below layers of warmer water in summer. As Irene approached from the south along the continental shelf, the data showed it churned up the cold pool into the warmer upper water so that the overall water temperature dropped dramatically before the storm hit land. “That’s like going from summer to winter in 12 hours for the ocean,” says Travis Miles, an assistant professor at Rutgers who was a Ph.D. student working with Glenn at the time. “In the open ocean, hurricane researchers, when they look at temperature drops that might affect intensity — one degree Celsius can have a significant impact.” Even though the colder water caused the storm to de-intensify, Irene still caused plenty of problems — especially inland as far as

RUCOOL’s Hugh Roarty and Josh Kohut attended the 2019 IEEE / OES Twelfth Currents, Waves, Turbulence Measurement and Applications Workshop (CWTMA) at the Catamaran Resort in San Diego from March 10- 13. Not only was Dr. Roarty the workshops technical chair of the event but he also presented “Evaluation of Wave Data from HR Radar by the National Weather Service” while Dr. Kohut and the Project Converge team presented “Horizontal Advection Critical for Maintaining an Antarctic Biological Hotspot”. Now how COOL is that?

Thanks to carbon emissions, the ocean is changing, and that is putting a whole host of marine organisms at risk. These scientists are on the front lines. Eric Niiler | National Geographic Grace Saba steadies herself on the back of a gently rocking boat as she and her crew slide a six-foot long yellow torpedo into the sea. A cheer erupts as the device surfaces, turns on its electronic signal, and begins a three-week journey along the New Jersey coast. “It’s taken seven years to get this done,” said Saba, who has been working on this experiment since 2011. “I’m so happy, I think I might cry!” Saba is an assistant professor of marine ecology at Rutgers University, where she is studying how fish, clams, and other creatures are reacting to rising levels of ocean acidity. Acidification is a byproduct of climate change; a slow but exorable real-life experiment in which industrial emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere are absorbed and then undergo chemical reactions in the sea. Rising ocean acidity has already bleached Florida’s coral reefs and killed valuable oystersin the Pacific Northwest. Now scientists like Saba want to know what might happen to animals that live in the Northeast, a region home to commercially important fishes, wild stocks of quahogs (clams), scallops, and surf clams that can’t swim away from growing acidic waters. “They are just stuck there,” Saba said. Saba’s torpedo-like instrument is actually an underwater drone, known as a Slocum glider, that is carrying an ocean acidity sensor. This is the first time that oceanographers have married the two technologies—glider and pH sensor—to get a big-picture view of changes underway in the commercially important fishing grounds of the Northeastern United States. The glider will travel 130 miles from Atlantic City to the edge of the underwater continental shelf and back. It will complete a series of dives to the ocean bottom, sampling water temperature, salinity, and pH as it swims. The glider will feed Saba and colleagues data on changing water chemistry more quickly than the testing conducted every four years by seagoing oceanographic vessels. Rising Acid Saba and Rutgers graduate student Liza Wright-Fairbanks are hoping to compare ocean pH measurements to coastal fish spawning grounds. Developing fish and shellfish larvae are most vulnerable to rising ocean acidity. “We don’t know much about pH throughout the entire water column, especially here along the East Coast and the commercial fisheries here,” said Wright-Fairbanks. “They bring in so much money to the country, but if the shellfish can’t survive than neither can the fishermen.” Scientists say the pH level of the world’s seas have already dropped—on average from 8.2 to 8.1 on the pH scale (lower numbers are more acidic). That’s a 26 percent drop in the past century (because the pH scale is logarithmic). But as the ocean absorbs more industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, its pH is expected to double to 7.7 pH units by the end of the century, according to Aleck Wang, professor of marine chemistry at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The result is that, by 2100, “you are going to start seeing calcium carbonate shells dissolve,” Wang said. “It’s not going to be that far away.” By killing such critical shelled organisms as corals, oysters, and many plankton, acidic waters may upend the ocean food chain. Fishermen in the Gulf of Maine are already seeing seasonal changes in ocean acidity that could one day threaten a seafood harvest worth more than $600 million to Maine’s economy. Further south in the Mid-Atlantic region, seafood harvesters worry about their future as well. “We are all trying to figure out the right path forward,” said A.J. Erskine, owner of a commercial oyster hatchery on the Potomac River in Virginia. “I don’t know if there is a solution, but the more data we have the more knowledge we have. If we don’t know the pH, how can we address it?” Erskine is part of a group of fishermen, scientists, and state fisheries managers called the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Acidification Network that is pushing for more research and attention on the issue. Scientists at the University of Delaware and NOAA just deployed the first permanent buoy to measure carbon dioxide levels in Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in the eastern United States. The moored buoy will help researchers figure out whether the bay can handle more CO2 from the atmosphere while also dealing with man-made pollution from surrounding farms and factories. In another attempt to study acidification, researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched 23-foot long surface drones powered by sail across the Pacific and Arctic Oceans to gather wind, temperature, and acidity data. They hope to eventually use the mobile saildrones to replace aging surface buoys that are tethered to the seafloor. Grace Saba of Rutgers takes water samples to better understand the changing ocean. And just as some scientists are trying to develop corals that are more resistant to acidic waters, Erskine says that one solution may be to find oysters, clams, and other fish that are resilient as well. “The way we can do that is by manipulating the tanks in the hatchery,” Erskine said. Of course, that only works for farm- or hatchery-raised species. “It’s more difficult when you are talking about Chesapeake Bay or the Gulf of Maine.” Gambling on the Future Back on the boat, Saba, Wright-Fairbanks, and Rutgers research professor Travis Miles spend the morning at sea testing the Slocum glider. They want to make sure its instruments are working perfectly before putting it on auto-pilot and sending it on its environmental mission. Each in turn throws overboard a gray plastic water sampling bottle attached to a rope known as a CTD. Those old-school measurements of water quality are then compared to sensor readings on the glider. After the Rutgers team deploys the glider, the 46-foot crewboat returns to a marina near the Golden Nugget casino in Atlantic City. Wright-Fairbanks is just starting her PhD at Rutgers,