Gliders In the Agulhas (GINA) Seaglider project

The Gliders IN the Agulhas (GINA) project is a multi-institutional effort to implement sustained glider observations around South Africa’s coastline to enhance existing regional networks and complement larger international observations systems such as the Ocean Gliders Boundary Ocean Observing Network (BOON). Ocean gliders are robotic platforms operated and piloted from land. The Seaglider during GINA was set-up to vertically profile the water column between depths of 0 and 1000m. Measurements collected included conductivity (salinity), temperature, depth (CTD), dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll-a fluorescence (proxy for phytoplankton concentration), Photosynthetically Active Radiation (PAR) and two wavelengths of optical back-scattering by particles, Bb(470) and Bb(700) (proxies for particle concentration). In addition, information collected from the Seaglider was used to derive surface and depth averaged currents.