July 11, 2014 — To track the ocean chemistry changes, unmanned gliders are being used inside and outside the Sound. Two Carbon Wave Gliders that look like yellow surfboards are propelled by wave motions and test surface conditions. The gliders are controlled back in the lab with an iPad.
Unmanned gliders are tracking how melting glaciers may be intensifying corrosive waters in Prince William Sound.
What’s happening is in different regions of the world, natural processes are worsening the effects of OA so that a region like PWS may already be preconditioned to have low pH conditions.
Jeremy Mathis is director of NOAA’s Ocean Environment Research Division at the Pacific Marine Environmental Lab in Seattle.
So now we have this manmade process combining with this natural process and it makes some regions more vulnerable to the impacts of OA than other regions.
To track the ocean chemistry changes, unmanned gliders are being used inside and outside the Sound. Two Carbon Wave Gliders that look like yellow surfboards are propelled by wave motions and test surface conditions. The gliders are controlled back in the lab with an iPad.
It’s been hugely successful. We’ve flown these things all over inside PW, we’ve had great control over them, we’ve been able to move them to exactly where we want them to be. So that’s been hugely successful. It’s making thousands of measurements at the surface all over PWS. 6
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