After a successful trial run in May, a NASA campaign is deploying aircraft, a research vessel and several kinds of autonomous ocean robots to study small ocean whirlpools, eddies and currents.
Using instruments at sea and in the sky, the Sub-Mesoscale Ocean Dynamics Experiment (S-MODE) team aims to understand the role these ocean processes play in vertical transport, the movement of heat, nutrients, carbon and oxygen from the ocean surface to the deeper ocean layers below. Also, scientists think these small-scale ocean features play an important role in the exchange of heat and gases between air and sea. Understanding small-scale ocean dynamics will help scientists better understand how Earth’s oceans slow the impact of global warming and influence the Earth climate system.
“The overall goal is to understand vertical transport in the ocean, and how the remote sensing measurements relate to the in situ, or ‘wet,’ measurements,” said Dragana Perkovic-Martin, a radar system engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
From 28,000 feet the DopplerScatt instrument bounces radar signals off the ocean to provide information about winds and currents at the surface. Another instrument flies below the clouds to observe how surface waves move and break. It collects measurements with a suite of laser-based and imaging devices, which allow the team to infer ocean currents from these measurements.
Several Saildrones and Wave Gliders will measure a vast array of factors such as ocean currents, wind speed and direction, air and water temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, and chlorophyll content.
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-instruments-sea-sky-nasa-s-mode.html