Kicking off a new year, with a new trial. TRICUSO colleagues from partners Euro-Argo and CNRS-IAS in collaboration with our sister project GEORGE, have been innovating acoustic wind sensor technology on floats, building on the work from a trial they undertook late last year.
Keeping the momentum going into 2026, a new trial began on the 11th of January 2026, in the Mediterranean with the team testing a winder-equipped float. Lending a helping hand is Vela Labs, a non-profit initiative using sailing vessels as low-impact scientific platforms to develop, deploy, and validate oceanographic instruments in collaboration with research teams, expanding ocean data collection while reducing costs and environmental footprint.
To test how the system will work under different ocean and weather conditions, the trial involves the float drifting past three buoys: Italian ODAS 1, French DYFAMED, and French Lion. The goal is to investigate how the team can calibrate or correct the wind speed measurements so that a single float can be used reliably across different wind regimes. Since the horizontal trajectory of the float cannot be controlled (only the depth at which it drifts), they are relying on the currents to carry it along the planned path.
This test is mimicking a Southern Ocean remote deployment scenario where future TRICUSO observation will take place, and where it is likely that only one reference point will be available at the start of the deployment.
Interested in learning more about the advancements in acoustic wind sensors? Read the new article in EGU’s Ocean Science by Louise Delaigue et al.: Passive acoustic monitoring from profiling floats as a pathway to scalable autonomous observations of global surface wind.
