Experiment with aircraft-deployed bathythermic buoys in the Bay of Biscay (west of France)

Oceanographic vessels provide the most accurate data as possible. On the other hand, measurements are long to collect, the sampling rate is poor, and the total cost very expensive. The period between measurements is too long to study the rapid variations of the currents. The knowledge of the environment for a given instant on a remote area needs to be able to rapidly deploy sensors to obtain real time profiles of temperature, sound velocity and current velocity. These new constraints have motivated the development of a new generation of oceanographic instruments intended to be deployed by aircraft. This paper describes an experiment of near real-time comparisons between Metocean XAN-3 aircraft deployed drifting buoys and Marisonde drifting buoys, previously deployed by ship.