General Glider FAQ

Hey everyone, it's Kyle here giving you all some general information of gliders. Here in our Topics class, almost every Tuesday morning we've heard the word glider several times and have seen pictures of this yellow, missile shaped machines. Some people who have taken this class before know quite a bit about these machines, but what about the rest?
So here I am to tell you rest a little more about these gliders, or their full name Slocum

First off: What exactly are gliders and who created them?

• Conceived by Douglas C. Webb and supported by Henry Stommel and others, the class of Slocum Gliders is named after Joshua Slocum, the first man to single-handedly sail around the world.
• The Slocum Glider is a uniquely mobile network component capable of moving to specific locations and depths and occupying controlled spatial and temporal grids. Driven in a sawtooth vertical profile by variable buoyancy, the glider moves both horizontally and vertically.
• The long-range and duration capabilities of Slocum gliders make them ideally suited for subsurface sampling at the regional scale. Carrying a wide variety of sensors, they can be programmed to patrol for weeks at a time, surfacing to transmit their data to shore while downloading new instructions at regular intervals, realizing a substantial cost savings compared to traditional surface ships.
• The small relative cost and the ability to operate multiple vehicles with minimal personnel and infrastructure will enable small fleets of gliders to study and map the dynamic (temporal and spatial) features of subsurface coastal waters around the clock and around the calendar. [What Rutgers is doing!]  (http://www.webbresearch.com/slocumglider.aspx)

Our next post is going to be about the different types of gliders: Thermal and Electric!