There’s something about the biology here

A semi-transparent SST image is overlayed on the geostrophic currents from the altimter and our two eddies of interest line up perfectly.  We have a roadmap.  400 km to Flores (FLW).

Zooming into the Scarlet Knight, we see improvements in the currents reported by the glider, and we are less than 9 km away from the Azores EEZ.

We now have to deal with the biofouling.  Something is attached to us, and pulling us to the right at seemingly random times.  We have increased the size of our diagnostic files we transfer during every surfacing to further investigate the problem.  There are times when something pulls us to the right in a flat spin that we can’t pull out of even with the fin hard over.  And then it goes away and we are flying fine.  The end result is that our distance made good along a desired heading is reduced, and that reduces our ability to navigate through an eddy field. The value if this glider just increased exponentially.  We need to find out what this is so we can protect future gliders from it.