The NorGlider infrastructure and recent results from the Lofoten Basin Ilker Fer

Ocean gliders are remotely-piloted autonomous underwater vehicles that move through the water using an inflatable bladder as a buoyancy engine. They profile vertically, by changing their buoyancy and pitch angle, to depths of 1000 m, move 15-25 cm/s horizontally and have mission durations of 4-8 months. Pilots monitor the progress of the gliders and can adjust mission parameters and sampling schemes throughout the deployment. The gliders may be equipped with sensors to measure physical (temperature, conductivity, pressure, currents, turbulence), and biogeochemical (pH, fluorescence, dissolved oxygen) properties.

NorGliders is a national glider infrastructure established in 2010 (formerly NACO) and is now in operational phase (http://norgliders.gfi.uib.no). NorGliders served in multiple projects operating in the Norwegian, Iceland and Greenland Seas, across the Norwegian slope, around Faroes, north of Svalbard, and in Svalbard fjords. In the first part of the talk, I will give an overview of NorGliders, the relevant activitiy, and future plans.

In the second part, I will briefly describe the Lofoten Basin Eddy in the Norwegian Sea, as sampled by gliders. The Lofoten Basin Eddy is a long-lived, deep anticyclonic vortex, frequently observed in the central part of the Lofoten Basin. The glider missions were concentrated to sample the eddy repeatedly, giving multiple realizations of radial sections across the eddy. The observations describe the vortex in unprecedented detail.