Arrived at 29°N!

A few days ago HB arrived at 29°N, our target latitude since this is where the blooms develop. The glider got here in good time, and we’ve got a few weeks to go before the bloom season gets going as they start to develop in July. Their latitude is usually pretty consistent, but they longitude is more variable, they develop somewhere between 130°-150°W. That's over 1,000 km, which is a big distance to cover, especially for a wave glider moving at a little over a knot! Obviously we are hoping for blooms to develop closer to 150°W than 130°W. While we are waiting for a bloom to develop we are going to head due south, into the center of a little eddy that blew the HB off course on the way up north. The HB's position on June 25, and the new waypoint (the big star) are shown in the image below. However this change of course puts us going directly into the prevailing current, so it might be a little slow going.

New Data Viewing Feature

Lynn DeWitt, the website designer,  added a data tab to the MAGI website which shows the past 7 days of data for all the relevant data streams on Honey Badger, a master systems control page!  Very cool - thanks Lynn!

Week 1

Honey Badger has been on its own for a week now, sailing (steaming?  flapping?) its way north.  All the sensors are working pretty well. There is a bit of a puzzle with one of the C3 sensors that is reporting chlorophyll, CDOM (colored dissolved organic material) and phycoerythrin.   It is connected to a computer board that allows us to change the sampling and averaging.  For some, yet unknown reason, the values from a single measurement every 10 minutes are 2 times the value of the values when 10 samples are taken and averaged together.  This is the data feed on the webpage, and you can see the jump back and forth as we changed the sampling.  It's very odd.  Fortunately, we have a redundant C3 sensor as well as the phytoflash unit. This latter instrument is not on the webpage since the data is a bit complicated to use and not as obvious as to meaning as things like temperature, salinity and pigment.

When in Hawaii,  I was given a unique WaveGlider data stick. It's cool. 

I wish it had a working sub-body (the part with the flapping vanes) so that we could have races! 

 Next time, I will tell the story of the Honey Badger Naming Ceremony that happened in Monterey, CA. 

The mission has begun!

Honey Badger is off to the North Pacific!  We replaced the TBT anti-fouling device over-nighted from Seabird Electronics last night (Thank you, Seabird) on the deck of the boat this morning, activated the Vengmar acoustic listening instrument  provided by Barbara Block of Stanford (listens for tagged animals, probably mostly sharks if we happen by one), and checked on the plugs in the tow fish.  Everything went splendidly and now Honey Badger is heading off to  the northwest.

Track as of 17:54 Hawaii Standard Time.  This can be seen on the main project page.  Honey Badger is where the big green dot it. 

The TBT anti-fouling device.   Brad's pinky is holding it in place until it gets reassembled.

Me checking on the electronics plug.  I fretted about this all weekend. They were tight. 

 This is the final picture of Honey Badger before it sails off into the open Pacific.  Good luck!

another long weekend

The antifouling device showed up from Seabird, but much later than we expected. So, Honey Badger will not get a TBT facelift until Monday. Brad will do it on the boat, so we don't have to bring it (her? him?  ships are her, but AUVs?  No nautical lore to guide me here) back to the dock.  I requested a more adventurous track than just a box so we could look for gradients and test both the instruments and the website.  The delay is not a big deal, although everybody would have liked to send Honey Badger over the horizon today.  I'm not leaving until Tuesday, so we will have some final pictures of the glider to post. 

Here is the official farewell picture for Honey Badger. Many thanks to everybody here for helping out with this and not looking too annoyed when I got in the way.

And here's Honey Badger being loaded and a farewell to land for a long time:

Test deployment successful

Honey Badger spent a long memorial day weekend in the water off the Big Island.  We've got our data streams up and running, and the website can present graphs of data and position. We are very happy!  There are still a few things left to do. The towfish was not a happy camper and was quite negatively  buoyant.  Brad and I spent much of the day getting it reballasted and figuring out ways to rapidly vent trapped air.  The problem with the phyto-flash was fixed by the Keith in Sunnyvale (thanks!) and is working.  Brad is prepping Honey Badger for the long haul, touching up paint, and the like.  We had one 11th hour crisis when Brad asked "when was the anti-fouling device on the CTD replaced?"  My blank stare pretty much said it all.  We don't know.  So, after a hurried phone call to the vendor (Seabird Electronics), I got another set ordered and FEDEXed overnight to us for delivery on Friday.  Brad will swap them out on the boat in the test area.   Meanwhile, Honey Badger goes into the sea again tomorrow for the final ballast check of the towfish. We will let it tow 24 hours, test the remaining instrument's performance (the phyto-flash) and on Friday, Brad will install the new anti-fouling device at sea.  Then, Honey Badger is good to go!

We have not decided whether to hold station in the test area for the weekend, or just send Honey Badger off over the horizon.  A lot will depend on the ballasting situation.  Stay tuned.

Here's a youtube video of Honey Badger being unloaded from the support vessel:
http://youtu.be/bH5WhSC7py8

Brad checking the tow cable.

Derek touching up the paint on the towfish.  

Testing is underway

Honey Badger is out in the ops area, doing squares.  The instruments are generally performing well.  One of the fluorometers has a funky temperature sensor, but that's not a big deal since we will not be using those data anyway (the CTD is designed for this and the primary temperature source).  We will have to fix the phyto-flash when it gets back in.  We launched knowing it was not sending good data, but did not have the fix in hand before the weekend was upon us. So, rather than waste the time, we decided to set Honey Badger loose for the long weekend and implement the fix on Tuesday when we recover.

Here's an overview of what Honey Badger is doing at the moment.  It's just running a box in the test area off of the Big Island.

A close up shows the detail. It's reporting a CTD data set every 10 minutes and that is what these points are linking to. It is moving at an average speed of about 1 knot, so the points are not far apart.  Besides, it has been going over the sam box for about 2 days now, so the data is pretty dense!

Many thanks to Bob  Simons at NOAA for getting our data stream in order.  Cara and I are very grateful for his efforts as well as to Lynn Dewitt for putting together the website.  This is going to be so much fun!