Exploring ocean dynamics and advancing marine research through innovative glider technology
Investigating the complex interactions between oceanographic events and long-term trends in coastal shelf waters, examining how water properties and dynamics evolve across multiple temporal scales. This research utilizes autonomous gliders to capture high-resolution data on temperature, salinity, and ocean currents, revealing the physical processes that drive variability in coastal ecosystems from individual storm events to multi-year climate patterns.
Establishing a comprehensive climatological baseline for Northern California coastal waters through sustained glider observations. This long-term monitoring program tracks seasonal cycles, interannual variability, and emerging trends in ocean temperature, upwelling intensity, and water mass properties. The resulting climatology provides essential context for understanding marine ecosystem changes, predicting future conditions, and supporting fisheries management decisions along the highly productive California Current System.
Deploying oxygen-equipped gliders to monitor the development, persistence, and spatial extent of low-oxygen (hypoxic) conditions on the Oregon and Washington continental shelves. These hypoxic events can devastate marine life and disrupt fisheries. Our gliders provide continuous, three-dimensional observations that reveal when and where oxygen levels become critically low, helping predict hypoxia onset, track its evolution, and assess impacts on commercially important species like Dungeness crab and groundfish.
A collaborative field experiment focused on understanding the three-dimensional pathways and evolution of water masses in the ocean interior. Using coordinated deployments of autonomous gliders, the RIOT project investigated subsurface ocean dynamics, examining how water parcels move and mix as they follow complex trajectories through the ocean. The research combined adaptive sampling with data-assimilative ocean modeling to track Lagrangian coherent structures, submesoscale features, and internal wave dynamics, advancing our understanding of ocean transport processes and their role in redistributing heat, nutrients, and biological organisms.
An Office of Naval Research investigation of the rich eddy field in the western Pacific region between the Luzon and Marianas Island Arcs. This complex oceanographic environment is shaped by the Kuroshio Current, monsoon forcing, strong tides, and dramatic topography, creating intense turbulent eddy exchange. The project focused on mesoscale and submesoscale variability including eddies, rings, vortices, and filaments—features that remain poorly constrained in numerical ocean models. ARCTERX emphasized autonomous instrument platforms, particularly gliders, which tracked these dynamic features over weeks to months across vast regions. The research integrated in-situ adaptive sampling with remote sensing and ocean modeling, from large-scale assimilative models to finer-scale process-resolving simulations, to understand how these oceanographic features interact with smaller-scale phenomena.
