Evaluating Existing Ocean Glider Sampling Strategies for Submesoscale Dynamics

• Mixing in the upper ocean is important for biological production and the transfer of heat and carbon be-tween the atmosphere and deep ocean, properties commonly targeted by observational campaigns using ocean gliders. Weassess the reliability of ocean gliders to obtain a robust statistical representation of submesoscale variability in the oceanmixed layer of the Weddell Sea. A 1/488regional simulation of the Southern Ocean is sampled with virtual"bow-tie"gliderdeployments, which are then compared against the reference model output. Sampling biases of lateral buoyancy gradientsassociated with the arbitrary alignment between glider paths and fronts are formally quantified, and the magnitude of thebiases is comparable to observational estimates, with a mean error of 52%. The sampling bias leaves errors in the retrieveddistribution of buoyancy gradients largely insensitive to deployment length and the deployment of additional gliders. Nota-ble sensitivity to these choices emerges when the biases are removed by sampling perpendicular to fronts at all times.Detecting seasonal change in the magnitude of buoyancy gradients is sensitive to the glider-orientation sampling bias butthe change in variance is not. We evaluate the impact of reducing the number of dives and climbs in an observational cam-paign andfind that small reductions in the number of dive-climb pairs have a limited effect on the results. Lastly, examin-ing the sensitivity of the sampling bias to path orientation indicates that the bias is not dependent on the direction of travelin our deep ocean study site.

Ämnesord

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Geovetenskap och miljövetenskap -- Meteorologi och atmosfärforskning (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Earth and Related Environmental Sciences -- Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

ceanic mixed layer

In situ oceanic observations

Sampling

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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