Physical trajectory profile data from glider ru26d deployed by Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey; Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RU COOL) in the Coastal Waters of California from 2019-09-05 to 2019-10-20 (NCEI Accession 0239022)

Sea Water Ocean Topography (SWOT) is a radar interferometry mission making SSH measurements over a swath 120 km wide. There is a nadir gap of 20 km where the error from interferometry is not meeting science requirement. The mission's calval requirement is to validate the along-track SSH performance in terms of a wavenumber spectrum of the measurement error by comparison to in-situ measurement. The current candidate for the in-situ measurement is an array of gliders along the center of a swath to resolve the dynamic height at wavelengths of 15-150 km. This will consist of 20 station keeping gliders 7.5 km apart. An OSSE study suggests that a station-keeping glider making vertical loop of the upper 500 m of the water column in 2 hours can meet the requirement of providing quasi-synoptic observations of the dynamic height from the glider array for comparison with the SWOT snapshot measurement of SSH from overflight. The primary objective of the deployment is to test the capability of gliders to retrieve the upper ocean dynamic height time series derived from the M1 mooring covering the upper 300 m of the water column. Another objective is to make simultaneous measurement of the SSH via a GPS buoy and the bottom pressure via a bottom-pressure recorder. These measurements will allow us to derive the steric component of SSH and compare to the hydrographic measurement by the mooring and gliders. This dataset contains Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) measurements. The glider will be deployed in Monterey Bay and transect 300km west southwest to a set of moorings and maintain a presence inside a pre-defined box. The glider will be deployed for approximately 3 months.

The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) received the data in this archival package from the Integrated Ocean Observing System's National Glider Data Assembly Center (IOOS NGDAC). The IOOS NGDAC received the data in one or more netCDF files comprising an entire glider deployment. The data are measurements of physical oceanographic properties such as temperature, salinity, conductivity, and density. The IOOS NGDAC checked the files for compliance to their netCDF file convention, aggregated the files into a single netCDF file, and then submitted the file to NCEI for long-term preservation.