ALBERT

Beschreibung: The Advanced Engineerig Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a development laboratory within the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department. Its function is the development of oceanographic instrumentation to test developing theories in oceanography, and to enhance current reseach projects in other disciplines within the community. This report summarizes recent and ongoing projects performed by members of this laboratory.

Beschreibung: The Advanced Engineering Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a development laboratory within the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Deparment. Its function is the development of oceanographic instrumentation to test developing theories in oceanography, and to enhance current research projects in other disciplines within the community. This report summarzes recent and ongoing projects perfomied by members of this laboratory.

Beschreibung: The Atlantic Long-Term Oceanogrphic Mooring (ALTOMOOR) has been maintained offshore Bermuda since 1993 as a testbed for the evaluation of new data telemetry technologies and new oceanographic instrumentation. It is currently a joint project between the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of Southern California This report documents the WHOI contributions which have focused on the development of new data telemetry methods and new mooring technology. Details of the instrumentation evaluations will be published separately. A new inductively-coupled telemetry technology for ocean moorings has been developed and tested on ALTOMOOR. The inductive link uses standard, plastic-jacketed mooring wire as the transmission path for data generated at the individual instruments installed on the mooring. The signals are inductively linked to the mooring wire via toroids clamped around the wire, thus avoiding the need for multiconductor electromechanical cables terminated at each instrument. Seawater provides the electrical return path. The inductive modems send and receive data at 1200b/s. A controller in the surface buoy collects data from each of the subsurface instruments and forwards the data to shore by traditional satellite telemetry (Argos) and by short range radio using a nearby ship as a store and forward node. The buoy-to-ship link operates over about 2 km at 10kBytes/sec. When the ship docks, data are offloaded automatically to a computer on shore which can be accessed via the Internet.

Beschreibung: Funding was provided by the Office of Naval Research through Contract Nos. N000-14-94-10346 and N000-14-90-J-1719.

Beschreibung: The Advanced Engineering Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a development laboratory within the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department. Its function is the development of oceanographic instrumentation to test developing theories in ocean physics, and to enhance current research projects in other disciplines within the oceanographic community. This report summarizes recent and ongoing projects performed by members of the laboratory.

Beschreibung: An automated, easily-deployed Ice-Tethered Profiler (ITP) has been developed for deployment on perennial sea ice in polar oceans to measure changes in upper ocean temperature and salinity in all seasons. The ITP system consists of three components: a surface instrument that sits atop an ice floe, a weighted, plastic-jacketed wire-rope tether of arbitrary length (up to 800 m) suspended from the surface instrument, and an instrumented underwater unit that profiles up and down the wire tether. The profiling underwater unit is similar in shape and dimension to an ARGO float except that the float's variable-buoyancy system is replaced with a traction drive unit. Deployment of ITPs may be conducted either from ice caps or icebreakers, utilizing a self contained tripod/winch system that requires no power. Careful selection of an appropriate multiyear ice floe is needed to prolong the lifetime of the system (up to 3 years depending on the profiling schedule). Shortly after deployment, each ITP begins profiling the water column at its programmed sampling interval. After each acquired temperature and salinity profile, the underwater unit (PROCON) transfers the data and engineering files using an inductive modem to the surface controller (SURFCON). SURFCON also accumulates battery voltages, buoy temperature, and locations from GPS at specified intervals in status files, and queues that information for transmission at the start of each new day. At frequent intervals, an Iridium satellite transceiver in the surface package calls and transmits queued status and CTD data files onto a WHOI logger computer, which are subsequently processed and displayed in near-real time at http://www.whoi.edu/itp. In 2004 and 2005, three ITP prototypes were deployed in the Arctic Ocean. Each system was programmed with accelerated sampling schedules of multiple one-way traverses per day between 10 and 750-760 m depth in order to quickly evaluate endurance and component fatigue. Two of the ITPs are continuing to function after more than 10 months and 1200 profiles. Larger motor currents are observed at times of fast ice floe motion when larger wire angles develop and drag forces on the profiler are increased. The CTD profile data so far obtained document interesting spatial variations in the major water masses of the Beaufort Gyre, show the double-diffusive thermohaline staircase that lies above the warm, salty Atlantic layer, and many mesoscale eddys. Deployed together with CRREL Ice Mass Balance (IMB) buoys, these ITP systems also operate as part of an Ice Based Observatory (IBO). Data returned from an array of IBOs within an Arctic Observing Network will provide valuable real time observations, support studies of ocean processes, and facilitate numerical model initialization and validation.

Beschreibung: Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation under Contract Nos. OCE-0324233 and ARC-0519899.

Beschreibung: The Advanced Engineering Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a development laboratory within the Applied Ocean Physics and Engineering Department. Its function is the development of oceanographic instrumentation to test developing theories in oceanography and to enhance current research projects in other disciplines within the community. This report summarizes recent and ongoing projects performed by members of this laboratory.