Scientific programme

A research proposal for a host institution.

An open, reference-calibrated weather probe in the Drake Passage: verification against a station standard, observation, drift

A school team is building three autonomous meteorological probes of its own open design — an ESP32 microcontroller, a research-grade barometer, an Iridium satellite modem, solar-assisted battery power, a printed Ø200 mm sealed sphere — and proposes to operate them in the Drake Passage and on King George Island during the 2026/27 season. One probe is installed beside a professional reference station and recovered at season's end; one identical copy is offered to a second station in parallel; one is released as an expendable drifting buoy mid-passage, north of 60 °S.

The programme answers a metrological question first — how accurate is a low-cost open instrument in polar conditions, when continuously compared against a WMO-grade reference? — and applies the answer where observations are scarcest: a sea-level pressure series from the Drake Passage with a stated uncertainty, a geostrophic wind estimate across the passage, and a Lagrangian drift track across the fronts of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. All data are open under CC-BY 4.0. The host institution is asked for a mounting point, one to two hours of a single landing, and access to its reference series for the overlap period; in return it receives live data access, co-authorship of the dataset and a repeatable, low-cost programme it can run in later seasons.

1. Who we are

SouthPing is a private school science project, not a funded research programme, and this proposal says so plainly. The team is sufficient to execute the programme as designed; the institutions around it add legitimacy and reach, they do not substitute for the work.

Ildar Gabdrakhmanov — project lead and principal investigator

Engineer. System architecture, electronics, enclosure, power, deployment, and all institutional correspondence. Travels with the 2026/27 expedition and personally performs the shore installation, the buoy release and the end-of-season recovery.

Timur, 10th grade — student lead, software

Owns the probe firmware, the server-side processing and the web dashboard — the software half of the project, not an assistant role. He attends Founders Classical Academy of Prosper, Texas, USA.

Jason K. Brogden — faculty mentor

Dean of Science Instruction at Founders Classical Academy and Director of the Lynx Science Academy, Prosper, Texas. Guides the project's scientific method and the student's research, and has offered to help prepare the results for a journal for high-school researchers after the season.

The school

Founders Classical Academy of Prosper, Texas, USA, a public charter school, is the project's school: its Dean of Science Instruction mentors the project, and it is the school party to any agreement with the host institution. There is no second school.

What we ask the host institution to add

A named scientific curator from its own staff, working with the project lead, in Russian. That is a smaller and more concrete request than “supervise our programme”: the curator deals with one person, in his own language, reviews the analysis plan, and fronts the programme where a named scientist is required.

2. Background and motivation

The observing gap. The Southern Ocean is the least observed ocean on Earth, and the Drake Passage is its narrowest, stormiest strait. Ship and buoy observations there are sparse; forecast-sensitivity studies rank drifting-buoy sea-level pressure at high southern latitudes as the most valuable single observation type per observation in the Global Observing System, precisely because there is so little of it. The Data Buoy Cooperation Panel (WMO/IOC) explicitly prioritises barometers on buoys in this region. This is the network's own stated gap, not a school project's rationalisation.

The instrument question. Professional drifting buoys cost tens of thousands of dollars each. Barometric sensors of research grade now cost a few dollars, and the rest of a probe — microcontroller, satellite modem, power, hull — can be built openly for under a thousand dollars in parts. What is not known is whether such an instrument, built by students and calibrated honestly, produces data of measurement quality in polar conditions. Answering that is a genuine metrological question, and the answer determines whether the low-cost approach can be repeated every season by other teams.

The sentence that defines the mission: an open-hardware probe costing under a thousand dollars, verified against a WMO-grade reference, measuring sea-level pressure where almost nothing else does.

3. Scientific questions and hypotheses

Each question has an external, checkable answer — a reference the result is compared against — which is what makes this science rather than a demonstration.

Metrological — the anchor, and load-bearing: how accurate is a low-cost meteorological probe in polar conditions, and what corrections does it require, when continuously compared against a professional reference station?

Method: A LAND probe runs beside the station's reference series for 2–3 months. The residual pressure difference is fitted as a temperature-dependent correction, p_corr = p_raw + a + b·(T_die − T₀), with a drift term if the residuals demand one. The hypothesis is that after correction the probe's sea-level pressure agrees with the reference to within the sensor's datasheet figure over the full range of ambient temperature encountered.
Output: A per-unit correction function and an honest uncertainty budget: reference uncertainty, fit residual, transfer uncertainty and drift. This question carries the other three — without it the drifting buoy's data are unattributable — and it is the only one that does not depend on the buoy surviving.
Reference: The station's official meteorological series.

Meteorological — the highest external value: what is the sea-level pressure in the Drake Passage, where there are no observations?

Method: The SEA buoy reports pressure eight times a day, every three hours, the standard synoptic hours (00/06/12/18 UTC) among them, corrected through the chain established by Q1.
Output: A sea-level pressure and sea-surface temperature time series from the passage with a stated uncertainty — valuable standalone, and directly assimilable if admitted to the WMO Global Telecommunication System.
Reference: ERA5 reanalysis, and any co-located ship or buoy reports.

Dynamical: how strong are the westerlies over the passage, and does the reanalysis reproduce them?

Method: The pressure difference between the LAND probe, fixed on King George Island, and the SEA probe, drifting mid-passage, yields the geostrophic wind — a wind speed measured by two barometers and no anemometer.
Output: A geostrophic wind estimate across the passage over the buoy's lifetime, compared against ERA5 10 m and geostrophic winds. Stated limitation: a two-point gradient over hundreds of kilometres is a coarse estimate, and the comparison is the result, not a claim of precision.
Reference: ERA5 reanalysis.

Oceanographic: where are the fronts of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, and what is the surface current speed?

Method: The buoy's GPS drift track, three positions per message, gives Lagrangian surface velocity; its hull-mounted temperature sensor gives sea-surface temperature. Crossing the Subantarctic and Polar Fronts should appear simultaneously as a change in drift speed and a step in water temperature — two independent signals that cross-check each other.
Output: Front positions and surface current speed along the track.
Reference: Satellite altimetry (CMEMS) and climatological front positions.

4. Instruments and methods

Three probes of one design, all built from the same open-hardware set. LAND-1 is the subject of this proposal; LAND-2 is an identical copy offered in parallel to a second station, each the other's backup; SEA is an expendable drifting buoy released mid-Drake Passage, north of 60 °S, from the expedition vessel.

The three probes

LAND-1 is the reference-anchored control instrument for Q1, installed beside the Bellingshausen Station reference series on King George Island between 15 and 28 November 2026 and recovered at season's end. LAND-2 is an identical copy offered to Escudero (Chile, INACH) as a second reference. SEA answers Q2 to Q4 and transmits until its power is exhausted; it is not recovered.

Hull

A Ø200 mm sphere printed in ASA, 3 mm walls, two shells bonded and bolt-clamped at an equatorial flange, with a hydrophobic membrane vent for pressure equalisation. All-up mass is about 2 kg with ballast, floating a little over half submerged. The design is verified by a 48 h submersion test before any hull is deployed.

Sensors

A Bosch BMP581 barometer (±0.3 hPa) is the mission pressure sensor, with its die temperature feeding the Q1 correction; a BME280 measures air temperature and humidity inside the hull; a waterproof DS18B20 (±0.5 °C) measures sea-surface temperature from a sea-flooded pocket in the lower shell; a u-blox SAM-M8Q receiver supplies position and UTC.

Link and power

A RockBLOCK 9603 Iridium Short Burst Data modem carries the data. Readings are taken hourly and held in a five-day buffer against failed transmissions, then sent as compact binary messages: SEA eight times a day, every three hours with the synoptic hours among them, LAND once a day, because a control instrument needs no latency. The transmission schedule is designed to downshift when the battery runs low, so a poor week degrades the data rate rather than the mission. Power is a six-cell 18650 lithium pack, solar-assisted by a small panel on the crown; the mission is sized to succeed without solar yield, because a Southern Ocean deployment cannot count on the sun, and the charger itself stops charging below freezing to protect the cells.

Data handling and engineering basis

Raw messages are never rewritten. Every derived product — corrected pressure, sea-level reduction, geostrophic wind, drift velocity — is computed from the raw archive with versioned code, so any result can be recomputed from first principles, and quality-control flags are stored beside the data rather than applied to it. The design, the firmware, the message contract and the server-side decoder are in one open repository, with a test suite that keeps the encoder and decoder byte-identical against shared fixtures.

5. The traceability chain

Station reference series (host institution)
        │   2–3 months of parallel record
        ▼
     LAND probes ──── mutual offsets measured before departure ────►  SEA probe
        ▲
        └──── a home unit, never travels: isolates sensor drift over time

A buoy at sea has nothing to compare itself to, so confidence in its data has to be carried to it: Stage 0, before departure, runs the barometer units side by side with a temperature sweep from −18 to +25 °C — the two-week co-run planned for October did not fit the build, and what remains is a co-run of at least 48 h with one temperature cycle, which Stage 1 refines; Stage 1 runs each LAND probe against its station series in the field from November 2026 to February 2027, giving the absolute anchor and the correction function; Stage 2 re-compares the home unit after return in 2027, isolating sensor-model drift from whatever the expedition did to the instruments.

6. Deployment plan and timeline

The schedule is set backward from the vessel's departure, which is not under the project's control.

When	What
September – October 2026	Done by 3 November: the carrier boards built and tested; the firmware and the server working end to end, with probes transmitting from the yard into the backend; the hull design finished; the charger's behaviour in the cold and the power budget measured. Not done: the institutional correspondence — this proposal, the request to INACH, the enquiry to OceanOPS.
3–14 November 2026	Hulls printed and sealed; the submersion test; Calibration Stage 0 at the minimum the traceability chain states; the outdoor end-to-end run with real satellite transmissions. Packing, spares, and written instructions for the station's winterers. This proposal, the OceanOPS enquiry and the INACH request go out.
15 November 2026	Vessel departs Ushuaia.
About 17 November 2026	SEA buoy released mid-passage. Deployment log: UTC time, position, sea state, photographs, serial numbers.
15–28 November 2026	LAND-1 installed during the landing at King George Island; the parallel record with the reference series begins.
November 2026 – February 2027	Season. LAND reports daily, SEA eight times a day. Live dashboard.
End of season	LAND-1 recovered — a written commitment. SEA continues transmitting until its power is exhausted.
March 2027 onward	Calibration fit, derived products, quality control, published dataset. WMO identifier and GTS applications continue.

Provenance: written consent from the vessel operator plus the deployment log above. Without it the dataset has no provenance.

7. What we ask of the host station

Close to nothing, materially. The one request that costs the station a person rather than a bracket — a named scientific curator from its own staff — is set out in section 1 and is not repeated in the list below.

A place to stand LAND-1

Wherever the station finds convenient — on its own mast or bracket, within a few hundred metres of the reference instruments. It needs no power and no network connection; everything runs from its own battery and reports over Iridium. Installation takes one to two hours of a single landing, by the project lead.

Removal at the end of the season

By the project lead on the return leg, or by arrangement with the winterers.

Access to the reference series, for Q1

The station's meteorological series for the overlap period — pressure, temperature and humidity at the station's native resolution, with sensor heights and the pressure reduction method. A detailed list of the metadata needed is provided separately.

Nothing at all for the SEA buoy

It is released from the vessel in minutes, outside the Antarctic Treaty area. No servicing is needed during the season either; the probes are operated remotely.

Permits and procedure

The host's formal requirements — a described scientific programme, permits and registration under national Antarctic procedures — are exactly what this proposal and the proposed agreement exist to satisfy. The team will follow the procedure the host names.

8. Data and publication

All data are open. The dataset is published openly and in full under CC-BY 4.0, in CSV and CF-compliant NetCDF, together with the calibration record and the uncertainty budget.

The host institution receives real-time access to the data through the web dashboard, the raw archive, and co-authorship of the dataset publication; results flow through national channels in accordance with Antarctic practice on scientific data exchange.

GTS. The Q2 pressure series is intended for the WMO Global Telecommunication System. Two independent routes are pursued in parallel so that neither blocks the other: the Russian route for the land station's observations through the host country, and the US route for the drifting buoy through NOAA/NDBC as the US representative to the Data Buoy Cooperation Panel. Admission to the GTS is amplification, not a precondition: the series is published regardless.

Instrument design, firmware and analysis code are in an open repository — code under Apache-2.0, and documents, drawings and data under CC-BY-4.0.

9. Expected results

A quantified accuracy characterisation

An open, low-cost meteorological probe measured in polar conditions and traceable to a professional reference station: a published correction function and uncertainty budget.

A pressure series from the Drake Passage

Sea-level pressure and sea-surface temperature from the passage, with a stated uncertainty.

A geostrophic wind estimate

Across the passage, and its comparison with ERA5.

A drift track across the ACC fronts

With front positions from two independent signals — drift speed and water temperature — compared with satellite altimetry.

An open, citable dataset

Published under CC-BY 4.0, with the instrument design and code in an open repository.

A student who has taken a measurement from a design to a published dataset

With a professional reference standing behind it.

10. Risks and honest limitations

Two properties make the plan robust. Q1 does not depend on the buoy: if SEA fails on day three, the land probe still delivers a complete, reference-anchored answer, so there is a guaranteed scientific result from the moment of installation. And Q2 does not depend on admission to the GTS — the pressure series is valuable and publishable on its own.

Risk	What we do about it
The host station declines	LAND-2 is offered to a second station in parallel, and several stations are within reach of the same landing.
The hull leaks	A bonded and bolt-clamped flange, a leak sensor, a submersion test article, and a 24 h confirmation dip before departure.
The sea anchor is lost	Detectable in the data, because drift speed correlates with wind. Q4 degrades; Q1 to Q3 are unaffected.
Calibration Stage 0 is short	The two-week co-run planned for October has become a co-run of at least 48 h plus one temperature cycle before departure; Stage 1 beside the station reference supplies the temperature coefficient over a wider range. Below that minimum, SEA's data are unanchored, and this proposal says so.
Permits	The buoy release lies outside the Treaty area; for the landing, the team follows the procedure the host names.

Limitations carried into the results rather than hidden: the two-point gradient of Q3 is coarse; the sea-surface temperature sensor's absolute accuracy serves front detection rather than absolute temperature; a Ø200 mm hull in Southern Ocean swell spends much of its time submerged, so per-attempt transmission success will be well below bench figures — which is what the retry logic and the buffer exist for; and solar yield at sea is expected to be far below bench values.

11. Long-term perspective

The programme is designed to be repeatable. An open, low-cost instrument can be installed and released every season, extending the series and bringing in new school teams each year, and each season's land probe re-anchors the next season's buoys against the same reference.

Season 2026/27 is the proof of concept. If the host institution is interested, the team is ready to design a multi-season programme together — which is also what the expedition operator has said interests it most.