There’s plenty more data in the sea: utilising a vast glider data set to understand Australia’s coastal seas (#157)
Australia’s coastal seas are physically and biologically dynamic, influenced by both coastal and open ocean processes. Along the southeast coast of Australia, the East Australian Current and freshwater river inflows have a strong influence on density and salinity gradients, while local upwelling creates favourable conditions for phytoplankton blooms. Resolving the submesoscale processes here requires high resolution measurements throughout the water column. Almost 37 million data points have been obtained during more than 40 underwater glider deployments off the coast of New South Wales, Australia over a period of 10 years as part of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) strategy. To help visualise this, that is equivalent to 1.5 data points per person living in Australia. Data processing and quality control checking such a large glider data set is at times challenging, and can be computationally demanding. In this presentation, the techniques used to process and quality check the data are described, and the data are used to identify submesoscale processes in the region.