A new Jupyter Notebook to design sampling strategy using a towed vehicle such as MVP, uCTD and Seasoar has been released by Bàrbara Barceló-Llull (IMEDEA, Spain) and Elisabet Verger-Miralles (UIB-IMEDEA, Spain).
The code allows to find spatial coordinates and time of the extremes of each transect and of each profile. Indeed, it provides the (lon, lat, time) coordinates of the extremes of each transect (information needed for navigation), as well as the (lon, lat, depth, time) coordinates of each MVP profile on a rotated sampling grid (information needed to do OSSEs). It needs as inputs:
- Northwestern position (position where the sampling starts)
- Sampling strategy parameters: length of transects, separation between transects, number of transects and angle of the rotated grid
- MVP parameters: time resolution (cycle time) and maximum depth
- Ship velocity in knots
- Minimum profile depth and vertical resolution
- Initial date and time of the sampling
Note that this strategy consists of a vessel moving from west to east sampling one transect, then moving down to the next transect, which will be sampled from east to west, and so on.
There are some assumptions for the OSSEs:
- The MVP is released at the beginning of transect 1, and recovered at the end of transect 1, the R/V navigates from transect 1 to transect 2 at the same velocity, release the MVP at the beginning of transect 2, recover MVP at the end of transect 2, and so on.
- A vertical profile for each cycle of the MVP is also assumed.
The code is written by Bàrbara Barceló-Llull (IMEDEA, Spain) and Elisabet Verger-Miralles (UIB-IMEDEA, Spain) in the framework of the FaSt-SWOT project to plan the FaSt-SWOT experiments. This code is based on the codes developed during the H2020 EuroSea project (Barceló-Llull, 2023).
You can find the Notebook here.