Newsletter #10

By on August 23, 2012 in Drifter Newsletter, Uncategorized

Experiments on the eco-friendly “Dan Drifter”

Thanks to Dan Palance, a summer student at the NOAA lab in Woods Hole, a more eco-friendly drifter has been developed and tested. The “Dan Drifter” is much like the “Eddie Drifter” except it has wooden dowel spars and canvas cloth sails. It also uses a wooden-handled scrub brush as a extension of the mast and transmitter platform. While this new design has not yet proven itself, more deployments are currently underway. If interested, email james.manning@noaa.gov for the latest construction manual. We have also conducted some experiments on other alternatives including drogued drifters.

New transmitter options

There are a variety of new transmitter options from multiple companies. We have investigated a few and even tested some but have not found any that surpass the advantages of the TrackPack. Depending on your application, however, some of these new devices might be more cost effective for you. We tested the “FoxTrax cell phone” option, for example, that sells for a little more than $200 but the batteries only last for about 700 hits and the monthly subscription of near $20 is charged whether you use the unit or not. The advantage is the more frequent fixes for deployments within cell phone range.

Results of 2012 deployments thus far

Figure 1. Track of drifters built by NOAA’s Teacher at Sea Alumni.

A total of 49 drifters have been deployed thus far in 2012. One of the most interesting tracks is that of the unit deployed near a set of tagged turtles off Delaware in late May. After a few weeks on the shelf, it was entrained in the Gulf Stream with a few others but then got caught in a big warm core ring (see Figure 1). To follow the path of these drifters and other as they head towards the Azores visit http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_tas_2012_1.html. As shown on the main drifter page, there are several other interesting tracks such as those from Dick Baldwin’s unmanned sailboats. Just in the last few days, we watched a few of them come ashore on the southeast corner of Newfoundland after more than 8000 kilometers of travel. He also has a few in the Gulf Stream headed towards the Azores.

New drifter deployers welcomed:

  • Bill Geppert at the Cape Henlopen High School who is working with the University of Delaware oceanographers
  • Scott Kendall (MATE participant) from the Grand Valley State University on Lake Michigan,
  • Mark Neary who works with Neal Pettigrew at UMaine Orono,
  • Jochen Schroer at New Brunswick’s NATECH Environmental Services Inc. of Canada.

Refurbishing old TrackPack transmitters

We have devise a method to refurbish old TrackPack transmitters by breaking open their housing, inserting a new battery pack (ordered from Hong Kong), and then rehousing them inside a “Otterbox 2000”. It works! If you would like us to do the job, send in your old TrackPacks that no longer work so we can try to get them going again.

The importance of “decommissioning” old transmitters

It is important that your old transmitters be “decommissioned” if they have either been a) lost or sea, b) water damaged, or c) you do not expect to use them within a year. Otherwise, the satellite company charges $2.65 dollars per month per unit for what they call a “maintenance fee”. You can always recommission them with a $30 “reprovisioning fee”.

Drifter-building presentations this fall

We have three presentations scheduled: Umass Boston (29 Sep), Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts (2 Oct) and URI Bay Campus (2 Nov). The URI event is part of the New England Ocean Science Education Collaboratives “Ocean Literacy” Workshop. All will be brief introductions to the program. We are looking for funding to conduct more extensive day-long workshops where participants actually build units to take home with them.

Future Plans

As mentioned in the last “newsletter”, we continue to look for funding for more drifter-building workshops and satellite time. We are working with the tracker manufacturer and service provider to minimize the cost to the schools involved. We continue to reduce the cost down within the range of a typical mini-grant proposal but, ideally we hope to someday secure a large gov’t grant. This would supply the various schools with the raw material they need to construct these units and to have them connect with their local fishermen for routine deployments offshore. If you have ideas, please email james.manning@noaa.gov. We now have a collection of proposals that can be reworked to fit your plans.

We encourage those who participated in a MATE drifter building session last year to contact us for help getting started with building and deploying.

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Drifter Newsletter #9

By on May 23, 2012 in Drifter Newsletter

New Developments in 2012
While funding is difficult to come by this year, we have managed to get at least some units in the water after joining forces with a few other groups doing educational/outreach work. As described individually below, we have started a collaboration with NOAA’s “Adopt-a-Drifter” and “Teacher-at- Sea” Programs as well as the “Educational Passages” Program. We continue our collaboration with the Marine Advanced Technology and Education folks as well as the National Marine Educators.  The alliance with these last two groups has resulted in deployments in other water bodies (Gulf of Mexico, the Pacific Ocean, and in the Great Lakes) in 2012.

School teachers building drifters in Woods Hole

NOAA’s Teacher­-at­-Sea Program
Thanks to Jenn Annetta and others at the TAS alumni workshop in mid-May 2012, we were able to construct four “Eddie” drifters. See photo above by Shelley Dawicki (NEFSC). These will be deployed at the end of May 2012 off the coast of New Jersey in 50 meters of water. They will be deployed by Heather Hass (NEFSC) alongside turtles to test the idea that many of these animals are passive drifters.

NOAA’s Adopt­-a­-Drifter Program
Working with NOAA’s Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary folks and Diane Stanitski (ADP) in late April 2012,  we deployed one of our Davis­-style “Eddie”surface drifters alongside their drogued drifter. We hope to do more of these paired­-deployments to document the water­-following characteristics of the different drifter designs.  Ken Kostel, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute videographer on board, was able to produce a great underwater movie of the drifter. If you can view “.mov” files on your computer, you can see it at:

http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/eddie_deployment_underwater.mov

Educational Passages
Finally, another new collaboration is with Dick Baldwin from Belfast Maine who has a unique way to interest elementary and middle­-school children in the romance of sail and oceanography. He has unmanned mini­-sailboats deployed that sometimes land on distant shores and are recovered by other school children. We have started tracking some of his boats/drifters on our website at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/ .  This is actually a 3­way collaboration with the NOAA salmon researchers John Kocik and Paul Music who attach listening devices. They attempt  to capture locations of tagged salmon smolts. The two boats deployed in  the Gulf of Maine off the  R/V Henry Bigelow (see photo by Nathan Keith NEFSC) came ashore a few weeks later. Thanks to lobstermen (Greg Runge, Bobby Colbert) and the local harbor masters, they were recovered and will be redeployed at the end of May 2012 in the North Atlantic. They will join five others that are hopefully on their way to Europe!

Unmanned mini-sailboats by Educational Passages

Future Plans
As always, we continue to look for funding for more drifter­-building workshops and satellite time.  We are working with the tracker manufacturer and service provider to minimize the cost to the schools involved. We continue to reduce the cost  down within the range of a typical mini­-grant proposal but, ideally we hope to someday secure a large gov’t grant. This would supply the various schools with the raw material they need to construct these units and to have them connect with their local fishermen for routine deployments offshore.

 

 

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Drifter Newsletter #8

By on October 14, 2011 in Drifter Newsletter

New Drifter Users in 2011

The following institutions have recently joined our efforts to deploy drifters around the country:

Sea Education Association students preparing for a deployment.

UMASS Boston Math and Science Dept
UMASS Boston Environmental, Earth, and Ocean Science Dept
Mass Marine Educators
Quincy MA High School
Florida State University
Collaboration of Jacksonville University/Academy of Coastal and Environmental Studies/Clear Science/Terry Parker High School of the Duval County Public Schools
Zephyr Marine Education Foundation
Sea Education Association
URI Graduate School of Oceanography
Penn State University
We welcome these groups and hope they can spread the word on drifters through other local school systems. The Zephyr Foundation, in particular, has introduced hundreds of high school students to drifters this past summer.   They took students on a dozen short oceanographic cruises in Woods Hole waters and deployed drifters. This involved a different high school on each trip with dozens of students and teachers!

The “Engineering Club” at Bristol Community College in Fall River, MA have been building drifters from the kits recently. The kits are still supplied by the Southern Maine Community College.

 

 

Documenting your deployments, groundings, and recoveries

Now that more than 30 labs are involved with deploying these drifters, we ask that you start documenting your deployments on the web. In this way, the information gets processed automatically in a standard format and  is entered directly into the database. Some of you have tried this in the last year or two and have worked out most of the bugs. Thank you. You can still call  (508-495-2211 or 508-566-4080) any time but, keep in mind, there are three steps to the documentation process that are linked from the main drifter site at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter as follows:

1. Go to the “planning your deployment” link and reserve your deployment id beforehand by entering the planned position and time of deployment. The website will return this 9-digit “deployment id” that depends on what you enter. You can then mark the body of your drifter before you deploy it if you like. Some users prefer to just mark the drifter with the 6 digit electronic serial number (ESN) of the transmitter but, in either case, you will need to conduct this first step in order to have your deployment properly processed and plotted. This also gives me a heads-up on your deployment plans.
2. After you put the drifter in water, you return to the drifter website to record the actual “deployment” information. You will need to start here with your “deployment IDs” that you got from step #1.
3. Finally, after you have recovered your instrument (or notice that it has grounded), you should return to the drifter website to record the “recovery” information. You are also asked a) to submit any photos and b) whether you want to “decommission” the unit at this time. If the unit is not decommissioned, the satellite company will continue to charge $2.35/mth for these units regardless of whether they are used or not. Keep in mind, however, that they charge us another $30/unit to recommission the units.

It is important that we follow through with these website forms so that the meta data associated with each deployment is properly logged (ie what type of drifter it is, whether it has a drogue, etc). We are trying to build a well-documented dataset that others can access and use in the future.

New Drifter Design Works

The 2by4-masted “Eddie” is now our standard surface drifter. It replaces the PVC-masted “Rachel” drifter, is less expensive, takes less time to make, puts less plastic in the ocean, exposes less to the wind, and has less hardware failures. Most users will agree it is far superior. One of the primary problems with the Rachel was the flotation failures at the end of the spars (the plastic buoy sticks were breaking).

Proposal Update

We had hoped to submit a full proposal to NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Grant call for k-12 education projects in earlier this year but our pre-proposal to partner with MATE, SMCC, GoMLF, and many New England-based marine educators was declined. We will look for other opportunities to follow-up on what we have been doing for years: engaging students in drifter designing. building, and tracking. The idea would be to have a series of workshops where marine science educators from local high schools, service providers, and students learn how to build drifters. Most of the drifters are deployed in offshore waters by fishermen. If you have any leads on new proposal opportunities where this would fit, please let us know.

Software updates

We are happy to report that nearly 100% of the drifter operation is powered by Python. Thanks to Xiuling Wu, a student from China, we have converted all the old Matlab code to this open source language and are ready to share the code with whoever is interested. We have assembled a package of “Python for Oceanographers” and will soon be ready to distribute it to our colleagues.

Conferences/Workshops

Two drifter-related events occurred in the past few months. A presentation was made at the National Marine Educators Conference in Boston and a workshop was held by the Marine Advanced Technology and Education (MATE) group in Monterey. Both introduced the drifter idea to more educators. We hope to promote more of these workshops in the future and look for funding that will supply schools with the basic kits.

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Stockbridge High School Building Drifter

By on September 19, 2011 in Uncategorized

We hope to complete the drifter today. Our goal is to be the first team to launch a drifter into the Great Lakes. We will be launching October 1st and 2nd in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary in Alpena Michigan and Lake Huron.

 The team has set up a facebook page that is updated daily with pictures, videos and announcements it can be found at:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Stockbridge-Advanced-Underwater-Robotics/148465301909424

Please friend us and follow the team.

Also the Jackson Citizen Patriot wrote a great article about the team it can be found on line at:

http://www.mlive.com/news/jackson/index.ssf/2011/09/stockbridge_high_school_roboti_1.html

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Drifter Newsletter #7

By on July 30, 2010 in Building the Drifter, Drifter Newsletter

July 2010

New Drifter Designs

We have been experimenting with alternative designs this summer in an effort to further reduce the cost and time needed to build surface drifters. Several new prototypes were built and tested in local Woods Hole waters including the:

  1. “Shawn Drifter” which has a 4 by 4 wooden mast and a flotation collar

  2. “Miles Drifter” which has a 4 by 4 PVC fence-post mast filled with 2-part foam

  3. “Eddie Drifter” which has a 2 by 4 wooden mast and a flotation collar

  4. “Vitalii Drifter” which is a mini-rachel drifter that uses a Garmin instead of a TrackPack

eddie drifter
Figure 1. The new “Eddie” drifter with a wooden 2-by-4 mast and collar flotation.

The first three are slight variations of the standard “Rachel Drifter”. The Eddie model (see photo below) holds the most promise in replacing the Rachel as our standard surface drifter. While the first Eddie prototype failed after a few days, the 2nd has been reporting regularly for 3 weeks. Not only is this drifter a bit more environmentally friendly, it is much easier to make and should cost hundreds less. More info on these alternative models is posted with photos on the “drifter deign and technology” link on the drifter website http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter

Gulf of Mexico Drifter Deployments

A couple dozen drifters were shipped to various labs on the gulf coast including University of South Florida in St Petersburg, Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, and NOAA’s Atlantic Oceanogrphic and Metereoology Lab in Miami. They were also sent down on both the R/V ENDEAVOR and the R/V DELAWARE to be deployed at various locations around the gulf. The tracks of these drifters can be viewed at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_BP_Spill.html . They are contributing to a multi-lab effort to understand the transport of the oil around the entire gulf as can be best seen at the USF site http://ocgweb.marine.usf.edu/~liu/drifter_all.html .

Proposal Plans

We hope to submit a planning letter to NOAA’s Environmental Literacy Grant call for k-12 education projects in early September. Partnering with MATE, SMCC, GoMLF, and many New England-based marine educators, we hope to follow-up on what we have been doing for years: engaging students in drifter designing. building, and tracking. The idea would be to have marine science students at local college visit local high schools to teach educators, service providers, and students how to build drifters. The drifters will be deployed in offshore waters by fishermen.

Highlights of 2010 Drifter Deployments

More than 200 of the SMCC/GoMLF/NOAA drifters have been deployed this year, more than any year prior. While many of them were short deployments of just a few days or weeks in estuarine/coastal waters, some have traveled offshore waters for months. The raw statistics as posted at http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/statsd.html show many of them that have each logged thousands of kilometers.

One of the most interesting tracks is that of unit # 105440672 which has been retained in the enormous tides of Bay of Fundy for nearly 3 months and is still traveling. While it has traveled a total distance of over 5000 kilometers, it is still only a few hundred kilometers from where it was originally deployed.

New Drifter Users

Since the last drifter newsletter, the following institutions have recently joined the cooperative effort to deploy drifters (or plan to do so in the coming year):

  • UMASS Dartmouth Ocean Mixing Lab

  • Sea Education Association

  • URI Narragansett Bay Project

  • Upper Cape Cod Regional High School

  • Woods Hole Science and Technology Education Partnership

  • NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory

Overlaying drifter tracks on sea-surface temperature images

MATLAB code has been developed to better visualize the relationship between SST structure and the path of drifters. The set of routines does that following:

  • browses remotely stored images at Rutgers University,

  • saves “good” images,

  • interpolates in time between good images,

  • interpolates in space over cloudy images,

  • generates animations of the drifter tracks on color-contoured imagery.

Thanks to Emily Motz, a summer student from SUNY Maritime School who has spent her summer in Woods Hole with the “Partnerships in Education Program”, the code has produced these animation at, for example:

http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/epd/ocean/MainPage/anim/sst_may2010/sst.html

The next phase of this project will overlay circulation model vectors. We are also developing a Phython application for drifter processing and visualization which will not require a MATLAB license.

ComTechMobiles satellite fee

As noted previously, there are two ways to pay for satellite fee:

  1. one time bill through the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation
  2. monthly bills from ComTechMobile

Drifter users are asked to be aware of which option they are under and, in the case of option #2, be ready to respond.

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Two months at sea, and still alive!

By on July 11, 2010 in College of the Redwoods, Drifter Newsletter

College of the Redwood’s drifter, deployed two months ago, continues to hang on and is now off the coast of Mexico (http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_redwoods_2010_1.html). Its course has generally paralleled the California coast with only two major exceptions. North of Point Reyes the drifter reversed its course and spent several days heading north before resuming its southerly trend. When the drifter reached the Gulf of the Farallons it spent more than a week wandering within the Golden Gate shipping lanes. Since its escape from the Gulf of the Farallons the drifter has been heading steadily southward.

More recently the drifter has been showing signs of a potential early death. For days at a time the drifter has failed to broadcast its location. Then, somewhat miraculously, it would raise its head and tell us where it was. At this time it has become reliable again, reporting its position every four hours. Surprisingly, it has once again struck out in a new direction. For the last week, the drifter has been creeping ENE on a beeline for Ensenada, Mexico. Has it overcome its buoyancy problems, or has it been recovered by a fishing vessel that is slowly working it’s way back to port?

One of the real joys of this project has been puzzling over the factors affecting the drifter’s wanderings. Every day has produced new mysteries and revelations.

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The Slow Death of CR’s Drifter

By on June 26, 2010 in College of the Redwoods, Tracking the Drifter

It appears that College of the Redwoods’ drifter is slowly dying. NOAA’s drifter guru, Jim Manning, feels that the drifter’s flotation may have been damaged. The drifter is probably partially submerged and is no longer transmitting its location. It has been over a week since its last transmission, about 75 miles offshore from San Luis Obispo.

Then, miraculously, the drifter reported its position WNW of San Diego the day before yesterday (http://www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_redwoods_2010_1.html)! Perhaps a fortuitous wave tipped the GPS unit out of the water for a moment at the precise instance of a position burst.  The drifter may still be in the game! Unfortunately it is unclear if, or when, it may transmit its location again. In any event, Mexican waters appear to be next on the itinerary.

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Insights into a Mystery

By on June 8, 2010 in College of the Redwoods, Tracking the Drifter, Uncategorized

After 28 days adrift, College of the Redwoods’ drifter is poised to reveal some insights into a long-standing mystery. Marine science students at CR have deployed hundreds of drift bottles over the last 25 years. The bottles contain a card asking the finders to record the location in which they recovered the bottle, and send the card back to us.

In that time we have developed a fairly good idea of where California’s coastal currents are likely to carry our bottles. During our storm season, the nearshore Davidson Current tends to transport our bottles northward. We have very high recovery rates during those times in northern California, Oregon, and Washington. On occasion our bottles have made it as far as British Columbia and Alaska. The Davidson Current tends to be best developed between mid-October and mid-February, but southerly storm winds in late spring and early summer often produce the episodic, short-lived appearance of the Davidson Current.

The California Current, on the other hand, sweeps close to shore during much of the rest of the year. Our drift bottles are usually carried southward during these times. If you’ve been following this blog, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that our drifter has been swept over 200 nautical miles southward in the last month, successfully avoiding all of the most common stranding sites. During this time of year, most of our drift bottles are recovered along the Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin County coastlines (counties that are north of the Golden Gate). Some of the bottles are carried south of the Golden Gate as far as Monterey County. The farthest south any of our bottles have ever been recovered is Big Sur.

Our drifter is now about 40 n.m. offshore along the Monterey coastline and rapidly approaching the latitude of Point Sur. For the last 25 years, the burning question has been, “Where do the bottles go if they don’t strand north of Big Sur?” Two of our bottles were recovered (several years apart) in the Philippines, but we have no other recoveries south or west of Pt. Sur. So, at long last, our drifter is on the verge of shedding some light on the mystery of where the surface currents carry our drift bottles.

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The Great Escape

By on June 2, 2010 in College of the Redwoods, Tracking the Drifter

Finally! After a solid week of meandering around in the Gulf of the Farallons dodging tankers, warships, and fishing boats, CR’s drifter has been recaptured by the California Current and is heading south. The drifter has been sailing steadily southward for the last three days, and is now halfway between the Golden Gate and Monterey Bay.

The Monterey Bay, however, presents a new set of challenges. The currents there are notoriously variable as witnessed by Monterey Peninsula College’s two deployments of their drifter over the last seven months (See their posts  from November 17th of last year and February 3rd of this year). The excitement is building here again as the drifter approaches its next aquatic hurdle. Wake up Deidre, there’s some jetsam heading your way!

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Marine Science Students Build A Satellite Drifter

By on May 28, 2010 in Uncategorized

College of the RedwoodsNews: Mendocino Coast
May 17, 2010 – 4:02:19 PM

Students in the Marine Science Technology Program (MST) have recently built and deployed an ocean drifter designed to study California coastal currents. The drifter is a four-and-one-half foot tall by four foot wide structure made of PVC pipe, vinyl “sails” and a package containing a satellite transmitter. The drifter is designed to float just below the surface of the ocean so that its path is largely unaffected by the wind. A satellite tracking device protrudes above the ocean surface so the path of the drifter can be monitored by MST students, scientists and the public.

It was dropped into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday May 11 with the help of the F/V Trek II about two miles offshore of Noyo Bay. The students have been waiting for ideal oceanographic conditions to drop the drifter to utilize the dominate California Current that flows from north to south, fueled by a northwest wind pattern. Strong northerly winds also foster coastal upwelling that pushes surface waters offshore. Upwelling brings cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface and sustains the tremendously diverse coastal ecosystem along the Mendocino Coast. Information gathered by the drifter will be used in future MST Program classes, such as the Oceanography class that will be offered this coming fall semester. Even if ocean currents force it up on the beach, the drifter can be recovered and redeployed unless it is too damaged.

Funding and support for the project came from the Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) program in Monterey via a grant from the National Science Foundation. Scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts provided materials and technical support to assist CR students to assemble the drifter, and the federal National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has donated the satellite time to track the drifter.

Marine Science Technology students on the Mendocino Campus are hoping to see how changes in wind and currents affect the path of their drifter. Watch the MST web page (http://www.redwoods.edu/Departments/Marine/) for a future link that will allow you to track the path of the drifter along with the MST students. You can access a real-time google map with the drifter location updated every four hours at the following address: www.nefsc.noaa.gov/drifter/drift_redwoods_2010_1.html

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