Ocean model ensemble for glider path planning

Abstract

Ocean gliders make use of a unique propulsion scheme that permits these vehicles to develop extremely long missions, at the cost of a relatively low surge speed. Hence, gliders' trajectory is highly influenced by ocean currents, which can even exceed the vehicle's nominal velocity. As a consequence, in order to improve the operational capabilities there is a need for intelligent path planning algorithms, as the high number of solutions proposed by researchers that can be found in recent bibliography demonstrates. However, those algorithms require additional tools to cope with the uncertain information they use. In this paper we analyze the application of ensembling techniques to fuse numeric outputs provided by multiple ocean forecast models, aimed at feeding the glider path-planner with as reliable as possible source information.