Saildrone: Unmanned Surface Vehicles for Ocean Data Collection at Scale

The oceans affect the fundamental processes that drive our weather and climate. Understanding these processes and how they impact the exchange of energy and mass across the air-sea interface is crucial, but getting reliable and affordable data from remote parts of the ocean has historically been difficult. Working with governments and private companies around the globe, Saildrone manufactures and operates a new type of ocean data collection infrastructure using wind and solar powered unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) which make cost-effective ocean data collection possible at scale. Saildrones are instrumented with a full suite of ocean, meteorological, and fisheries acoustic instruments and have been successfully deployed for months in challenging regions of the ocean. This session will present two real-world examples of successful ocean data collection mission to illustrate the capabilities of this new platform.

1 / Reduced sea-ice in the Arctic is changing air-sea heat, momentum, and mass fluxes. This crucial region is difficult to monitor because of extreme temperatures, changing ice cover, and remoteness. Larger uncertainties in numerical weather prediction and climate models are directly related to the sparseness of data. Additional in situ observations will improve our understanding of air-sea fluxes in this region and how they may be impacting global energy, hydrological, and carbon cycles.

2/ In the face of ocean acidification and over-fishing, fisheries management is becoming even more important. Combining the air-sea sensor suite with the most advanced underwater acoustics, Saildrones can help create sustainable fisheries for future generations by improving our understanding of how the physical environment is affecting fisheries. These data provide a multi-trophic level, inter-disciplinary, basis to understanding bio-physical interactions.