Glider ends mission on the Portuguese coast

After 3 months of mission at sea, with about 980 nautical miles covered, the equivalent of more than 1800 kilometers, from the coast of Ireland to Portugal, the glider at the service of the iFado project in the PAAnoramic mission was collected on March 15, by the Hydrographic Institute with the support of the ship NRP Hidra of the Portuguese Navy.

The PAAnoramic mission is part of the iFado Project, which aims at three glider missions simultaneously covering the seas of Ireland, Spain and Portugal, with the aim of acquiring various data from the Ocean that will contribute to the monitoring of the deep waters of the Atlantic. This is the first international multi-platform ocean monitoring mission in the North Atlantic, in which several gliders autonomously collect ocean data.

This glider (the second in a series of three), sailed from the NOC (National Oceanography Centre), in Ireland, passing through the observatory of the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, ending 20 miles west of Cape Espichel, where it was picked up by the Hydrographic Institute ( IH).

The third glider will be from PLOCAN (Plataforma Oceânica das Canárias), is already at the IH facilities, where it was calibrated at the Calibration Laboratory and will be launched west of Cape Espichel, in a mission planned for next week aboard the NRP Andromeda . He will sail to the MONICAN/MONIZEE Observatory (Oceânica and Coastal Nazaré buoys) from where he will head towards the Canary Islands in the summer.