Weather Station Mike is operated by a manned ship, and it has been in operation for more than thirty years beyond the termination of the other weather ships which had been operating in the Atlantic since the late 1940s. Whether or not it will be financially possible to continue operating a ship at Station Mike in the future is of course not known. We seek in this task to operate autonomous instrumentation (a “glider”) while the weather ship is still operating, to investigate the feasibility of transferring to such instrumentation for the ocean data, and to build up parallel time series, avoiding gaps. The glider will actually provide much more information about the ocean than Weather Station Mike can: the glider can make sections, and it measures not only temperature and salinity along the way but also current strength across its path.

The glider will monitor the strength of the Norwegian Atlantic Current, crossing it once a week and it will make vertical profiles at Station M for the remainder of the time. In addition to the immediate transfer of the data to the operational center (WP2) we will will provide real-time information about the current, through web services set up at met.no – so that anyone can check every day what the state of the Norwegian Atlantic Current is!. We will homogenize the new observations with the historical Station Mike data, and thereby put the historical Weather Station Mike data into a larger dynamical context.