The ICM Instrumentation Service has recovered two of the buoys that were let out in 2013, in thre frame of the SPURS campaign. The project’s objective was focused on the processes responsible for the formation and maintenance of the salinity maximum associated to the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. During the campaign, researchers from de ICM together with NASA members, let out a sum of 50 buoys, 10 Spanish and 40 North Americans, to study the atmosphere-ocean interphase.
The ICM Instrumentation Service has recovered two of the buoys that were let out in 2013, in thre frame of the SPURS campaign. The project’s objective was focused on the processes responsible for the formation and maintenance of the salinity maximum associated to the North Atlantic subtropical gyre. During the campaign, researchers from de ICM together with NASA members, let out a sum of 50 buoys, 10 Spanish and 40 North Americans, to study the atmosphere-ocean interphase.
The Spanish buoys were initially designed in the ICM by Agustí Juliá with the collaboration of Pere Fernández, responsible of electronics and telecommunications, and Kintxo Salvador, in charge of mechanic design and programming, with the support of diverse project developed along a decade before. This buoys are prepared for measuring superficial seawater salinity and temperature with a high-tech dispositive (SBE37SI) and transmit a data per hour in real time.
Among the 50 buoys let out in the sea, only the 10 spanish buoys have been navigating and sending data for more than two years, its estimated lifetime. However, three of these buoys have pass this barrier and have achieve three years in function.
One of these ended its days close to where it was let out, in the salinity maximum of the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, and could not be recovered. But the other two buoys have been recently recovered. One was located by Mario Cartwright, who found it stranded in a beach in the Bahama Islands and, knowing that it could be a valuable instrument, looked a way to contact the ICM and give it back to its origin point. The other one ended in Vizcaya, where colleagues from ICM went to pick it up.
During its journey, the buoys, guided by ocean winds and currents, have collected a long temporal serie of data in a wide area. These data are really valuable to study ocean salinity, a key parameter to understand and predict global climate. Throughout their trajectory, they also become the home of many marine organism, turning into real traveling ecosystems.
Inspired in ‘visual thinking’, Kintxo Salvador and Ana Ceballos have wrote and illustrated an story to transmit the adventure of the buoys, that can be downloaded in this link (Spanish): La vida de una boya.pdf
Image: Trajectories of the three buoys from 2013 to 2016