Seven surface ocean drifters named after the “Seven Dwarfs,” were built by\u00a0Clearwater Instrumentation for deployment during the summer 2012 off the west coast of the US. Two drifters ended up not being deployed for technical reasons (doc and happy), but the other five remain at sea at present, until their batteries give out in a few months.<\/p>\n
In a small NSF pilot project, my Co-PI\u00a0Masako Tominaga<\/a>\u00a0and I along with\u00a0Senior Engineer Paul Fucile<\/a>\u00a0are developing surface ocean drifters to autonomously measure the Earth’s magnetic field in the open ocean. Based on an idea by colleague\u00a0Will Sager<\/a>, we wish to supplement the sea surface measurements made by ships in areas of the ocean where such measurements are rare or will likely not be collected. For example, the Southern Ocean, due to the remoteness of the area and the lack of ship transits across this area, has very sparse data coverage. Satellite and airborne measurements lack the resolution or endurance respectively to be able to measure the magnetic field in these remote areas. The magnetic drifter measures the magnetic field and its geographic position every 20 minutes and communicates these data back to shore using an\u00a0Iridium<\/a>\u00a0link every four hours.<\/p>\n\n Magnetic drifters “doc” and “happy” remain on shore for the present time<\/p>\n This research is supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant 0961163<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Global Magnetic Drifter Pilot Project Seven surface ocean drifters named after the “Seven Dwarfs,” were built by\u00a0Clearwater Instrumentation for deployment during the summer 2012 off the west coast of the US. Two drifters ended up not being deployed for technical reasons (doc and happy), but the other five remain at sea at present, until their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":588,"menu_order":7,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/980"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=980"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1066,"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/980\/revisions\/1066"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/588"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/website.whoi.edu\/deeptow\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}