Evaluating Wave Glider Meteorological and Oceanographic Data Using in Situ and Remotely Sensed Coastal Data in the Delaware Region

One of the limitations of coastal forecasting is the lack of high spatial-resolution meteorological and oceanographic observations. One platform that can fill the sensing gap is a wave glider. The wave glider is a coastal autonomous vehicle that can obtain simultaneous meteorological and coastal data in real time. During 15 days in November of 2022, the wave glider was deployed off the Delaware coast. During this period in late fall, there were several storms and turbulent ocean conditions, one of which occurred entirely while the wave glider was station keeping (SK) to be compared with the closest NOAA buoy. In this study, we focused on the use of the wave glider atmospheric and oceanographic observations to identify mesoscale environmental variations and characterize the storms. The wave glider data were compared with available station and buoy observations, and with weather radar data from the station at Dover, DE, and the NOAA GOES16 SST product to evaluate spatial and temporal patterns. The largest variations occurred during frontal passage, indicating that the wave glider platform and sensors would be very helpful in storm detection and tracking along the Northeastern US coast. In general, the wave glider and Buoy 44009 data showed strong correlation with respect to air temperature, sea surface temperature, wind speed, and wind direction. Data from the Wave Glider were compared with output from a high-resolution, mesoscale atmospheric model (WRF) for each storm. Further research will also investigate using the wave glider data as input to improve the prediction of variable coastal weather conditions that occur before and during storm passage.