So have you ever wondered how meteorologists and weather forecasters predicted major storms weeks in advance? Well, ocean gliders that were originally used to help research ocean animals are now helping predict major storms. A group of professors at Rutgers University teamed up with workers at Orsted to help develop technology that will help determine weather patterns during hurricane season. Ocean gliders are used to help facilitate ocean modeling and storm forecasting these gliders, not only provide research about ocean animals but also measure sea temperatures is important when forecasting tropical storms. DC News Now sat down with a few members of the team to learn more about how this will change the way forecasters predict storms. “I was doing a mission. We said, well, let’s keep it out there. It doesn’t get seasick. You know, it’s going to collect data like we haven’t seen it and it really fundamentally changed the way that we look at the coupling between the ocean and the atmosphere. In the model,” Travis Miles, an Assistant Professor, with the Center for Ocean Observing Leadership at Rutgers University said. “Our main goal with them is to get improve our understanding of the intensity of hurricanes. So basically, the ocean is a heat engine,” Josh Kohut, a professor of Marine and Coastal Sciences, at Rutgers University mentioned. The company Ørsted decided to make its data public, submitting it to the NOAA’s Integrated Ocean Observing System and the Global Telecommunications System to support ocean modeling and storm forecasting. Original article at DC News Now

On Monday, October 3, three American scientists have been welcomed to the premises of the AGOA Sanctuary as part of an opportunistic collaboration. Our scientists are taking advantage of the deployment of an American glider in the waters of the French West Indies to attach a hydrophone to it and test a data collection method. Travis Miles, Joe Gradone, and Doug Wilson, American researchers from the University of the United States Virgin Islands and Rutgers University in New Jersey, work on ocean water parameters. They are carrying out a mission in the southern Caribbean arc with the aim of studying the heat transfers of the currents coming from Brazil and entering the Caribbean. This mission also allows them to improve meteorological models for predicting cyclones, which require precise water temperature to gain momentum. To carry out this mission they use an underwater glider. The glider is an autonomous device controlled by satellite which will take measurements in the water column on its way. It performs programmed dives up to 1000 m depth during which its sensors (oxygen, temperature, salinity) will record the characteristics of the water masses according to the depth. Each time it comes to the surface, the glider sends the results of its dive ashore via satellites. Around the world, gliders are also used to study the chemistry of the oceans or the animals that inhabit them. Equipping them with hydrophones makes it possible to hear the animals that are on the mission’s path: whale songs, sperm whale clicks or dolphin whistles. The interest is then to obtain recordings of areas that are not easily accessible by boats, offshore, in the depths, while avoiding the sea conditions of the hurricane season. Thus, this type of mission can help improve knowledge on the distribution of cetaceans on the scale of the Caribbean. The American team therefore agreed to attach a hydrophone to the back of the glider at the request of the AGOA Sanctuary team. This deployment is a first for the Caribbean, and will allow us to test the potential of this method in our waters. The “RU29” glider was deployed this Wednesday, October 5 on the Caribbean coast of Martinique. Transported to sea thanks to the nautical means made available by the Marine Natural Park of Martinique, the machine mounted on a launching ramp was slid into the ocean. It will descend through the interior of the Caribbean arc until it reaches the waters of Granada, then return to Martinique in about 1 month. It will then be revived to go this time towards the north of the arc. While the information from the physical sensors is sent by satellite in near real time, it will be necessary to wait for the return of the glider to extract the acoustic recordings and analyze them in search of cetaceans. The presence of American scientists for a week allowed many discussions on scientific cooperation in the Caribbean, and the usefulness of gliders for different studies, marine mammals of course, but also water quality, currents, etc. . We hope that these fruitful contacts will continue in the future. Original article in French at AGOA

Glider technicians, Nicole Waite and Kaycee Coleman, traveled to Sitka, AK last week to deploy glider RU26d. RU26d is our first deep glider with a pH sensor and will be out in the southeastern Gulf of Alaska through August collecting measurements on ocean pH. This deployment, led by Dr. Grace Saba, is part of a larger ocean acidification monitoring project and is funded by the Alaska Ocean Observation System (AOOS, https://aoos.org/). Our glider will supplement ocean acidification measurements in the region, in conjunction with a research cruise next month. Nicole and Kaycee were hosted by the Sitka Sound Science Center (https://sitkascience.org/) while they made final preparations to and deployed RU26d. While in Sitka, Nicole and Kaycee joined the local radio station, KCAW, to talk about the pH glider mission. They also hosted a meet and greet with the Sitka community to talk about RUCOOL, ocean acidification, and RU26d – where everyone was very excited for and welcoming to our cool ocean robot! You can listen to the full radio interview here: https://www.kcaw.org/2022/07/12/rutgers-university-to-deploy-ocean-acidification-observation-robot/

Teledyne Marine has awarded a Teledyne Marine and Doug Webb graduate student fellowship over the next three years in celebration of RU COOL’s 30th anniversary. This graduate fellowship is focused on supporting research using autonomous underwater gliders.  This reflects the strong multi-decade partnership between Teledyne Marine Rutgers and Doug Webb (the inventor of the Slocum Glider).  Doug Webb has long been an inspiration to the RU COOL team and his mantra of “work hard have fun and change the world” is the group’s motto.

A new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) could revolutionize undersea exploration and shed light on ocean warming. Some new underwater vehicles, like the Mare-IT project, are designed for industrial purposes like inspecting drilling rigs or wind turbines. The project’s two-armed underwater robot is used for complex inspection and maintenance tasks. But researchers say the more urgent need is for scientific exploration. “We need to measure the amount of heat the ocean and atmosphere is absorbing each year,” Hugh Roarty, an ocean engineer at Rutgers University and IEEE Member, told Lifewire in an email interview. “This will help provide guidance on the climate models we are using to make decisions and shape policy.” Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), operated and controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) methods, inspect, maintain, and repair offshore installations under water. A consortium led by the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) developed a holistic solution in the Mare-IT project to make this vision a reality: an innovative, two-armed AUV for complex inspection and maintenance tasks, embedded in a powerful IT infrastructure that enables both intuitive control and monitoring of the system and effective information flow with the plant operator. The project was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). To ensure the safety of offshore infrastructure such as wind turbines or oil and gas production facilities, regular inspection and maintenance is essential. However, the work carried out under water not only is complex and expensive but also involves considerable risks for the divers who perform it. Remotely operated underwater systems (ROVs) are already being used to monitor the condition of maritime assets. However, there is a tendency toward systems that remain in the water for long periods of time—so-called subsea resident AUVs—and operate there autonomously and at the same time can be remotely controlled if necessary. Full article at JPT

This week Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RUCOOL) Assistant Professor Dr. Travis Miles and PhD Student Joe Gradone deployed RU36, the newest addition to our glider fleet, off St. Thomas. This glider will be measuring temperature, salinity, oxygen, and subsurface currents in the passage way between St. Thomas and St. Croix.  This effort will lead to a better understanding of the transport of heat and freshwater into the Caribbean Sea which impacts the global distribution of heat through its role as the beginning of the upper limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC).

Rutgers has been participating in the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) project at Palmer Station Antarctica for over 30 years. During the fall of 2021, graduate students Quintin Diou-Cass and Joe Gradone joined UConn Postdoc Jessie Turner on the R/V Nathaniel Palmer to head to the West Antarctic Peninsula. Over the next few weeks, we are going to write up accounts of their experiences during their research way, way down under. Here is account of some glider recovery fun. Two gliders were deployed to study both the zooplankton distribution on the West Antarctic Peninsula as well as a hydrographic fronts in the South Bransfield Strait. These autonomous underwater vehicles make researchers’ lives easier at times by collecting data in harsh conditions where ships cannot travel. As anyone who has worked with a glider for just a few days can tell you, however, these cool instruments can be very fussy too. My job (Joe) on the cruise was to keep the two gliders we deployed as happy as possible while also continuing my work helping the Schofield phytoplankton lab. The cherry on top of an already eventful glider deployment was trying to recover both gliders in what was forecasted to be 50 knot winds and 10-20 foot seas. While a large research vessel would be able to sustain these conditions without issue, we needed to put zodiac’s in the water to recover these gliders. So, when we saw the forecast, we devised a plan to fly the gliders into the very northern edge of a channel in an attempt to essentially hide behind an island and seek shelter from the winds so that we could put a small boat in the water. Miraculously, this plan worked! The seas were significantly better behind the island and we were actually able to swim the glider almost right up to the ship. Definitely a memorable recovery.