Scarlet Breaks the World Distance Record

The Scarlet Knight (RU27) surfaced at noon today, collected her GPS location, and recorded a total path length of 5,702 km, breaking the World Record for alongtrack distance set last year by RU17 at 5,700 km.  From now on, every surfacing pushes the World Record higher. The tracks of the two gliders are shown below, with RU27 in white and RU17 in yellow, both plotted over the sea surface temperature that shows today’s meandering Gulf Stream.  There are remarkable similarities. Most striking to me is the wall both gliders hit near 45 W as they left the Gulf Stream Meander and Ring region and entered the Gulf Stream Extension region.  At this interface, both gliders encountered a strong eddy that they had to fly around, a diversion that was followed by a jump to a more northerly course.  RU27′s improved design as well as the improved environmental guidance has enabled us cover that path length faster than RU17, and to stretch that path length out over a greater east-west distance. 

Plotting the tracks over the bathymetry, The Scarlet Knight is now directly over the rift valley of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the longest mountain chain in the world.  We are leaving the North American Plate and starting to fly over the Eurasian Plate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Plates_tect2_en.svg

We’ve adjusted the areas extracted from the global CCAR altimetry product and the NRL HYCOM forecast model, setting them up to cover at least the region from 30 W to 10 W.  This sets up the final U.S. guidance products.

And now the Europeans get to try their hand at flying.  In the photo below, Dave Kaminsky (white hat), now in his senior year as a student at Rutgers, is introducing our European students Al, Adrian and Fillipa to the processing and display codes for the satellite ocean color imagery Antonio sends us from the Canaries everyday.  The European students will help us get the European guidance products into our Google Earth flight planning displays over the next two months. Displayed on the big screen is the track of RU27 as it crosses the rift valley and breaks the world record.