Model Assessment and Deployment Strategies for Drifting Instruments

Abstract

The long-term goal of ODDAS is to develop strategies for the deployment of drifting sensors that maximize the amount of environmental information collected with the fewest sensors. Two critical concerns in these deployments are: the advection of the array out of the region of interest during the operational period, and the distortion of the array with subsequent loss of information. Mesoscale and submesoscale advective processes are responsible for array translation and distortion. Our primary long-term research goal is to quantify submesoscale stirring process. Calculating the origin and fate of representative parcels is an essential part of our analysis. Thus, the long-term research and ODDAS goals are complementary. The methodology is directly applicable to deployment planning and the data from the deployments are useful in our assessments of stirring.