Disclaimer: This material is being kept online for historical purposes. Though accurate at the time of publication, it is no longer being updated. The page may contain broken links or outdated information, and parts may not function in current web browsers. Visit the NASA Salinity website for more information.

What Are Wave Gliders?

Fred Bingham
Fred Bingham
Professor
University of North Carolina

Dr. Bingham received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego in Oceanography. His research interests include global distributions of sea surface salinity and large scale regional physical oceanography in the Kuroshio, the western North and Equatorial Pacific, and Onslow Bay, North Carolina.

Webinar Clip
A wave glider is one of the most technologically advanced pieces of oceanographic research instrumentation currently used in at-sea research. In this clip, Dr. Bingham, a professor of physics and oceanography at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington gives an overview of the various components aboard a glider and then shows examples of the data they generate while at sea. This video focuses on wave gliders within SPURS (Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study).

Full webinar: Follow that Salt! Results and the Future of Salinity Exploration

Click here for a transcript of this clip (PDF, 37.3 KB).

Resources
Applicable Science Standards
  • Planning and Carrying Out Investigations Planning and Carrying Out Investigations. Scientists and engineers plan and carry out investigations in the field or laboratory, working collaboratively as well as individually. Their investigations are systematic and require clarifying what counts as data and identifying variables or parameters.
  • Analyzing and Interpreting Data Analyzing and Interpreting Data. Scientific investigations produce data that must be analyzed in order to derive meaning. Because data patterns and trends are not always obvious, scientists use a range of tools - including tabulation, graphical interpretation, visualization, and statistical analysis - to identify the significant features and patterns in the data. Scientists identify sources of error in the investigations and calculate the degree of certainty in the results. Modern technology makes the collection of large data sets much easier, providing secondary sources for analysis.
  • Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions. The goal of science is the construction of theories that provide explanatory accounts of the world. A theory becomes accepted when it has multiple lines of empirical evidence and greater explanatory power of phenomena than previous theories.