The CARTHE team spent years planning for LASER (LAgrangian Submesoscale ExpeRiment), 1 month at sea, and will analyze and publish results for the next few years. This was by far the largest experiment of its kind ever conducted. The team is exhausted but have recovered enough from the taxing time at sea to begin looking forward. They are rejuvenated by the data that is coming in. We have collected well over 10 million data points from our GPS-equipped biodegradable drifters alone! As resulting articles are published, we will share those on our website: http://carthe.org/publications/.
Using two research vessels, three planes, and cutting-edge technology, the LASER team acquired troves of ocean data from hundreds of survey miles; 1,000 biodegradable drifters; 8,000 high-resolution photos; 10,000 biodegradable drift cards; and 500,000 infrared images. This monumental effort is already paying off big dividends with nearly ten million data transmissions to date, providing information that prediction models can use now.
Read the full summary of LASER by the GoMRI communications team here
Dr. Helga Huntley, CARTHE co-PI at University of Delaware, also shared a nice summary of LASER in the following video:
CARTHE drifter trajectories in the Gulf of Mexico superimposed on AVISO surface currents. Red squares mark drifters positions on 9 March 2016 and the tails are 14 days long. (Credit: Edward Ryan and Tamay Ozgokmen from the University of Miami)