The upper ocean is a complex sea of lateral variability on scales ranging from less than a meter to many hundreds of kilometers. Small-scale processes, in particular those that happen within the wave-influenced surface boundary layer, often elude detection, except during highly specialized field campaigns. Observational challenges stem from the fact that large manned vessels heave and roll, inducing large relative velocities between sensor packages and the sea surface. Additionally, ship-induced stirring of surface waters can contaminate near-surface observations around a large vessel. Fast, seaworthy, rapidly sampling autonomous craft overcome some of these issues, and they provide a complementary means to sample complex three-dimensional upper-ocean processes on the relevant spatial and temporal scales. Such processes are often associated with the lateral stirring of freshwater from rivers, localized rainfall, and ice melt, which can form small-scale filaments and fronts that may control irreversible transports near the air-sea and ocean-ice boundaries. Elucidating the structure of the associated instabilities and turbulent fluxes permits better understanding of air-ice-ocean interactions and feedbacks.

Nash, J.D., J. Marion, N. McComb, J.S. Nahorniak, R.H. Jackson, C. Perren, D. Winters, A. Pickering, J. Bruslind, O.L. Yong, and S.J.K. Lee. 2017. Autonomous CTD profiling from the Robotic Oceanographic Surface Sampler. Oceanography 30(2):110–112, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2017.229.

Kimball, P., J. Bailey, S. Das, R. Geyer, T. Harrison, C. Kunz, K. Manganini, K. Mankoff, K. Samuelson, T. Sayre-McCord, and F. Straneo. 2014. The WHOI Jetyak: An autonomous surface vehicle for oceanographic research in shallow or dangerous waters. Paper presented at the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), 2014 IEEE/OES Conference, October 6–9, 2014. IEEE, https://doi.org/10.1109/AUV.2014.7054430.

MacKinnon, J.A., J.D. Nash, M.H. Alford, A.J. Lucas, J.B. Mickett, E.L. Shroyer, A.F. Waterhouse, A. Tandon, D. Sengupta, A. Mahadevan, and others. 2016. A tale of two spicy seas. Oceanography 29(2):50–61, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2016.38.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.