The SWOT Postlaunch Oceanography Field Campaign Data from Gliders collection provides the provides the conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) measurements and current velocity measurements from autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) deployed by the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) postlaunch field campaign. The SWOT satellite mission launched in late 2022 and underwent a calibration and validation (cal/val) phase in 2023. As part of cal/val, an array of oceanographic instruments was deployed at a site 300 km offshore of California. Two Slocum gliders from Rutgers University were deployed from March to August 2023 as part of the SWOT cal/val effort. <br><br>
Gliders are autonomous vehicles that move up and down in the water column by changing their buoyancy, and while doing so, generate forward propulsion with wings and attitude control much like a glider airplane. The gliders were equipped with CTD sensors for temperature and salinity, and operated in the upper 1000 m of the ocean. Each up/down motion generates a CTD profile, much like a ship-based CTD system or the moored CTD profilers but with some lateral motion in addition to the vertical profiling. The glider data here are provided as full time series, rather than being sorted into profiles.