Below: a Generation-3 Saildrone re-enters Norton Sound in Alaska after 105 days in the Bering Sea monitoring fish stocks; making an unmanned craft like the Saildrone self-righting is relatively easy, but making the rig and platform sturdy enough to survive violent inversions required a huge amount of development. Right: Saildrones are now built in Alameda using carbon female tooling machined by Janicki Industries in Washington State (sometime boatbuilders for Oracle). And not quite where it all began (below right) – there were many years of hard work and demoralising setbacks before Jenkins eventually hit record gold with Greenbird
Now that’s trickledown
Only rarely is a radical technology used to break a major world record then developed for mainstream or even commercial use. Think round-the-world flight, land speed record, even the remarkable Vestas Sailrocket. But when Richard Jenkins smashed the world speed record using windpower he was already thinking about a much bigger picture
Back in 2012, when I proposed the
Saildrone concept to a panel of ocean scientists, their reply was ‘if you can do it, it is a game-changer, but it’s impossible’. That was, of course, the ultimate incentive to prove otherwise. After the successful crossing of our early prototype from San Francisco to Hawaii in 2013, 2,200nm in 32 days, the same panel conceded that it ‘may be possible to cross an ocean, but
36 SEAHORSE
you’ll never measure anything useful for ocean science, you can’t take precise measurements from a moving platform’. Once again I had been handed the incentive and so I reached out to some of the world’s best oceanographic institutes to ask them what they wanted to measure, and how we should go about it. While everyone had somewhat over - lapping requests, they all pointed to the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL, the engineers behind NOAA’s ocean and atmospheric measurements) as the ‘gold standard’ for ocean data. Cap in hand, I went to PMEL’s head- quarters in Seattle to present the Saildrone concept to a tough audience: 100 of the world’s best oceanographers and climate scientists. While they were certainly scepti- cal, they warmed to the potential of the platform and agreed to test the Saildrone on a pilot mission.
It took 14 months to redesign the elec- tronics and software package to accept the suite of sensors. These all needed to be con- trolled remotely, with data viewed ashore in real time to enable ‘adaptive sampling’: modifying the mission to respond to observed changes in measurements. I think, still sceptical about the chances of success, they chose one of the toughest locations for the proof-of-concept mission: the Bering Sea.
We deployed two Saildrones out of a
cold and snowy Dutch Harbor, in the Aleutian Islands, on 25 April 2015. The purpose of the deployment was twofold: to test the Saildrone’s endurance in high lati- tude and rough conditions, and also com- pare our measurements against those of buoys and research ships.
The vehicles sailed north out of Dutch, up to the ice edge, where they mapped thermal and salinity boundaries as the ice retreated during the summer. When all the ice had melted they were tasked further north to survey the Yukon Delta, where we were sailing in water as shallow as 7ft, as marked on the chart.
Concerned that we might run aground,
I asked NOAA’s hydrographic department how recent those soundings were and if there was any higher-resolution data? They replied that the last time that area had been surveyed was in 1899, so we were the first science vehicles to go there in over 100 years. I tasked them slightly further offshore…
The two Saildrones returned to Dutch Harbor after 97 days of being deployed, each covering around 4,500nm. Subse- quent analysis of the Saildrone data by PMEL’s oceanographers concluded that Saildrone measurements were accurate, and of ‘climate quality’, meaning that they could be used in scientific studies including weather/climate prediction.
This was a turning point for the project –
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