2021 Arctic Saildrone Cruise Report

Saildrone is a wind and solar powered unmanned surface vehicle (USV) capable of long distance deployments lasting up to 12 months and providing high quality, near real-time, multivariate surface ocean and atmospheric observations while transiting at typical speeds of 3-5 knots. The drone is autonomous in that it may be guided remotely from land while being completely wind driven. The 2021 Saildrone Arctic campaign deployed two Saildrone unmanned surface vehicles (USV) during a 76-day cruise in the Bering and Chukchi Sea, from 6 July 2021 to 20 September 2021. The overall mission objective was to measure atmospheric and oceanographic conditions in Alaskan arctic waters. A special emphasis during this year’s cruise was to better understand the spatial/temporal scales of air-sea covariance in the Chukchi Sea. This was addressed by running a series of parallel tracks using the two Saildrones at varying horizontal offsets. Each Saildrone was equipped to measure air temperature and relative humidity, barometric pressure, surface skin temperature, wind speed and direction, wave height and period, seawater temperature and salinity, chlorophyll fluorescence, and dissolved oxygen. Both vehicles measured near surface currents with 300 kHz acoustic Doppler current profilers (ADCP). This Saildrone Arctic dataset consists of 2 data files for each of the Saildrones deployed, all in netCDF format and CF/ACDD compliant. One file contains saildrone platform telemetry and surface observational data (air temperature, sea surface skin and bulk temperatures, salinity, oxygen and chlorophyll-a concentrations, barometric pressure, wind speed and direction) at 1 minute temporal resolution. The second file contains the ADCP current vector data, depth-resolved to 100m at 2m intervals and binned temporally at 5 minute resolution. The project, Multi-sensor Improved Sea-Surface Temperature (MISST), is funded by NASA through the National Ocean Partnership Program (NOPP).