Underwater robot gliders are measuring air and sea interaction during hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic region. The little yellow submarines are part of a collaborative effort between Rutgers and Monmouth universities. Rutgers marine and coastal sciences expert Travis Miles says these 6-foot long gliders safely collect temperature data. “Ahead of a storm, you don’t want to be on a boat collecting data,” he said. “We don’t want to send our students out or our employees out to do that work. The robots can go to sea and actually do very very well while they’re out there.” The yellow gliders are launched from Monmouth University’s research vessel Heidi Lynn Sculthorpe, a 49-foot boat christened in 2018 and named after a lifelong shore resident. Heidi Lynn Sculthorpe’s father was a Monmouth University board member. Ocean heat is the fuel for hurricane winds. Data gleaned from these gliders provides an insight into what makes a big storm tick. Miles says the gliders, borrowed from the Navy and NOAA, collected data from hurricane Irene in 2011 and Sandy in 2012. “When we recover these systems, we pull those data cards out and they have a wealth of information on them. We will use those to analyze how the ocean mixes ahead of storms or during storms. How that that heat goes back into the atmosphere. We’ll look at ocean velocities. We’ll look at ocean salinity.” Original Story by Joe Cutter at NJ1015.com

RUCOOL was visited by forty students from the Rutgers Future Scholar’s program. They learned about topics ranging from what happens at the NJ beaches in the summer, to the ongoing climate change and it’s impacts that our students and faculty are monitoring in person in the Antarctic every winter. They even had some hands on time with our ocean glider fleet.

New Jersey 101.5 | Dino Flammia A robot enters the ocean and pulls in the right amount of sea water to help itself glide but not sink. For three weeks straight, the robot’s sensors are scanning the sea — from top to bottom — to spot any water-quality abnormalities. Every two hours, the robot comes up to the surface, sticks out its tail (equipped with an antenna) and transmits data to researchers on land. Sounds like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie, but that’s actually what will happen later this month and what has been happening about three times per year over the past decade. In partnership with the state Department of Environmental Protection, Rutgers experts deploy underwater robot gliders to help monitor water quality during the beach season. The first deployment of 2019 is expected to occur in the middle of June. The robot’s mission takes it from Sandy Hook to Cape May, constantly measuring dissolved oxygen and other factors that relate to the health of the water and the wildlife using it. “The glider needs at least about 30 feet of water to really perform well,” said Josh Kohut, associate professor or oceanography at Rutgers-New Brunswick. Kohut said “the tool fills a gap” left by other water-monitoring efforts conducted by the state. May 20 marked the 45th anniversary of New Jersey’s Cooperative Coastal Monitoring Program, through which quality testing is conducted weekly at hundreds of ocean, bay and river beaches. Aerial surveillance flights occur six days a week as well. The robot’s next mission should run through the July 4 holiday. Its sensors also indicate when it may be getting too deep or too close to the ocean floor. And with its ability to make a satellite phone connection, its updates every two hours let researchers see in real time where it’s located, what it’s sensing and whether battery life is efficient. Kohut said “the partnership with DEP has been in place for the past 10 years“. Kohut said “a glider happened to be in the water in 2011 when Hurricane Irene came up the coast“. “Because gliders don’t get seasick we kept it out in the storm, and we learned a lot about how the ocean and the atmosphere work during hurricanes,” he said. Article Credit: https://nj1015.com/ Photo Credit: Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observation Leadership (RUCOOL) Flickr Gallery Contact reporter Dino Flammia at dino.flammia@townsquaremedia.com

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

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

The first college class I walked into was Oceanography House with Professors Scott Glenn, Oscar Schofield, and Josh Kohut. It was an interesting classroom experience; a small class of roughly ten students, with seven mentor students, and three professors. Yet as the semesters passed (this is the fourth time I’ve taken it), I learned swiftly that this kind of classroom organization is the one that works the most effectively. Oceanography House was a laid back class; homework was a collective group post on a blog, the professors guided students in the right direction when a question was asked and no one knew the answer, and the mentors were friendly. The professors never endlessly babbled but they did guide students towards answers to a question instead of blurting it outright like other professors. We were taught about the local nor’easter, Mid-Atlantic Bight, Antarctica, and the bottom of the ocean. The fundamentals of oceanography that I learned and council with Professor Kohut aided me in getting an A in my Introduction to Oceanography class. My connections with Professor Schofield has lead me to potential lab work on shad in the Raritan River with another of Rutger’s professors, Olaf Jensen. On the last class of Oceanography during the spring semester of my freshman year, we were taken out to the Raritan River on a short cruise. It was a beautiful day out and I knew that experience on a resume would put me one step ahead of my peers when looking for a job. Towards the end of the cruise, I asked Professor Glenn about how I could engage myself in research opportunities and he said “you just have to ask.” So I asked him and he offered me the chance to work with Nilsen on monitoring the first leg of the Challenger Mission. Throughout that entire summer, I worked on tracking Silbo’s progress using HYCOM, Google Earth KMZs, and AIS ship trafficking info. I’ve also been able to work with two international students from the Canary Island’s oceanography program, PLOCAN. During that summer, me, Nilsen, Reuben, and Alberto (the visiting students from the Canary Islands) went on two local glider deployments and got to know one another, to a point where Alberto offered me a room in his house, should I ever visit the Canary Islands. The class is laid back and yet it is the class that I’ve received the most from, hundreds of hours of reading a book could not produce what I’ve gained. First and foremost, I’m in good graces with three directors of IMCS, the home of the prestigious COOL Room. My mentor this semester showed me what qualities a strong leader should possess, a controlled aura of authority, an open mind, and initiative. I’m now a part of the documentation of the global undertaking of the Challenger Mission and I have friends on the other side of the Atlantic. It saddens me though when my peers are talking while any of the professors are trying to speak; I don’t think they realize that they’re in the presence of world-renowned professors and the 2010 NJ Professor of the Year.

Research Interests The physical aspects tend to pique my interest the most – waves, currents, tides, and the motion of the ocean. Specific interests include the physical coupling of the ocean and atmosphere, and the effects that the ocean has on weather. I’ve spent a large part of my career collecting and analyzing glider data in an attempt to provide more data for models to assimilate, hoping to significantly improve forecasting. I do, however, find smaller scale phenomena just as interesting – a tidal jet approaching an ideal laminar flow showing up in the ADCP data we’re collecting will have me as excited as a kid in a candy store. Short History Whether it’s work or play, the ocean is my forte. Growing up in NJ I spent a lot of time on the ocean, but going to school in New Mexico, I had a very limited view of what oceanography actually was. Attending Rutgers broadened my horizons significantly, and I joined COOL as an undergrad. Bringing with me a significant set of hands-on skills and seamanship, I filled a specific niche and was able to forge a path all my own that has blossomed into an incredible career. From building and designing moored instrumentation arrays, to CODAR technician, to glider pilot and technician, to scientific research diver, and now research vessel captain, it has all been very fulfilling. I am a Rutgers “lifer”, and I now enjoy imparting that knowledge to the next crop of scientists and technicians that come through RUCOOL.