Image courtesy of the researchers/
http://news.mit.edu/
The team demonstrated the technique in several field experiments in which they deployed drifters and human-sized mannequins in various locations in the ocean. They found that over the course of a few hours, the objects migrated to the regions that the algorithm predicted would be strongly attracting, based on the present ocean conditions.
places from where you’re seeing the ocean current projecting where you might go. So you have to do this other level of processing to pull out these structures. They’re not immediately visible.”
OUT AT SEA
Led by WHOI sea-going experts, the researchers tested the TRAPS approach in several experiments out at sea. “As with any new theoretical technique, it is important to test how well it works in the real ocean,” Rypina says.
In 2017 and 2018, the team sailed a small research vessel several hours out off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where they deployed at various locations, an array of small round buoys, and manikins.
“These objects tend to travel differently relative to the ocean because different shapes feel the wind and currents differently,” Peacock says. “Even so, the traps
are so strongly attracting and robust to uncertainties that they should overcome these differences and pull everything onto them.”
The team ran their modeling and prediction systems, forecasting the ocean’s behavior and currents, and used the TRAPS algorithm to map out strongly attracting regions over the course of the experiment. The researchers let the objects drift freely with the currents for a few hours, and recorded their positions via GPS trackers, before retrieving the objects at the end of the day.
“With the GPS trackers, we could see where everything was going, in real-time,” Peacock says. “So we laid out this initial, widespread pattern of the drifters, and saw that, in the end, they converged on these traps.”
The researchers are planning to share the TRAPS method with first responders such as the U.S. Coast Guard, as a way to speed up
search-and-rescue algorithms, and potentially save many more people lost at sea.
“People like Coast Guard are constantly running simulations and models of what the ocean currents are doing at any particular time and they’re updating them with the best data that inform that model,” Peacock says. “Using this method, they can have knowledge right now of where the traps currently are, with the data they have available. So if there’s an accident in the last hour, they can immediately look and see where the sea traps are. That’s important for when there’s a limited time window in which they have to respond, in hopes of a successful outcome.”
This research was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation’s Hazards SEES program, with additional support from the Office of Naval Research and the German National Science Foundation.
The Report • September 2020 • Issue 93 | 65
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