RU27 spins, Drake cruises in uncertain oceans, and the COOL family is great!

Life in the COOL room is always intense.  Today was a typical day, and while it sounds like I am complaining, I am not.  I am addicted to it. That probablly does not say much positive about me, but know what you are and enjoy the ride!

Drake is heading due East which is awesome given the confused currents in our current position (see below)! There is nothing like a clean deep water flying glider! Man, compared to the headaches of a bio-fouled 200 m Scarlett, Drake is cruising. Of course Scarlett has been to sea almost 4 months and has set the world’s distance record, and while RU27 may be limping tonight, this afternoon a RUCOOL team was dispatched, a small group but  the best, to snag some photos ofRU27 as she continues her underwater to Europe. Regardless we do stop tonight to appreciate Scarlett has reached European waters! As our Spanish partners would say tonight we raise our beers to our field team heading to sea “Force Wind and Honor All”!

While that was going on, we had a more local issue to deal with. RU05 was a Rutgers glider we deployed with the NJ State of Department Environmental Protection (DEP) last week. It was cruising off the NJ coast surveying the coastal water quality over the weekend, demonstrating how this technology can benefit the State needs. We were cruising and encountered a well-meaning fishermen who spotted her. There was an old deployment date on the side of the glider and like all the fishermen off New Jersey, he was great and COOL, and rescued an asset from our group he thought was in trouble. He called once back onshore, and our the CODAR team was in the neck of the woods working on shore sites and swung and retrieved the glider. It will be dusted off and redeployed this week and meet up with State DEP vessels. So we tonight we also toast the State DEP for partnership and the NJ fishing community who always got our backs! “Force Wind and Honor All”

Meanwhile Drake continues heading East. The SST looks, weird. Is it cold like the satellites say?

It is not, there is unfortunate cloud cover that clearly has contaminated the imagery.

So lets compare the HYCOMM forecast (white arrows below) and altimetry (colors and black arrows), this will blaze a clear path! Unfortunately while there are many agreements in the these data sets, there MANY discrepancies. Drake will have to sort the right data sets in the coming days, but given the due east heading the glider we are cool. So we will reconcile the discrepancies in the coming days.

But in all the chaos, there are times you stop and feel good. Our COOL group, and all the assocaited partners from Teledyne Webb/CODAR/Satlantic/SeaSpace, and our priceless academic partners are a large wonderful crazy family. Tonight we celebrate as our COOL family is bigger as we welcome Riley to our chaos! We also toast Courtney and Josh who are two the people who allow the rest of us to be crazy. Josh and Courtney are central to our team and without them well we would suck. The Kohut family is central to us and tonight we celebrate their new family member! “Force Wind and Honor All”