Underwater Gliders

Researchers aboard R/V Melville used propellerless gliders to study the role of the ocean in Earth’s climate.

The Kuroshio Current, the world's second strongest ocean current, was surveyed in April 2007, using the latest autonomous gliders deployed from R/V Melville with University of Washington's (UW) Craig Lee and Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Dan Rudnick as principal investigators. Like the Gulf Stream in the Atlantic Ocean, the Kuroshio Current acts as a conveyor belt carrying warm tropical waters north, playing an important role in Pacific climate. Working on R/V Melville near Luzon, Philippines and Taiwan, where the current forms, scientists deployed propellerless ocean gliders. Seagliders developed at UW and Sprays developed at Scripps Oceanography were deployed to traverse the current – which, in places, clips along at 1 to 2 feet a second – unassisted for months at a time.

"We used the two different gliders as a 'fleet,' which allowed us to conduct surveys with as many as four operating at any given time," Lee said.

The rocket-shaped Spray gliders were codeveloped by Scripps physical oceanographer Russ Davis.  Davis and researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution developed Spray in the 1990s to provide scientists with a new tool to autonomously measure the world's oceans for several months before being recharged.

During two other Office of Naval Research-sponsored projects led by Lee on R/V Melville, scientists learned more about how waters flow in nearshore and coastal areas – important to understand when dealing with such things as fisheries management, pollutant dispersal or how best to conduct a search-and-rescue mission – and gathered information to improve ocean mixing models.

— Annie Reisewitz, Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Sandra Hines, University of Washington