Outline of ODU/CCPO's contribution to the
Chesapeake Bay Observing System:
Cooperative Expansion and Integration Demonstration (CBOS-CEID)
Cooperative Expansion and Integration Demonstration (CBOS-CEID)
Oceanic, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences
Old Dominion University As part of a NOAA-funded consortium of Chesapeake Bay research institutions (Horn Point Laboratories in Maryland, the Virginia Institute for Marine Sciences, and Old Dominion University's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography), we are planning on making real-time observations of surface waves and over-water wind in the lower Chesapeake Bay. This page is here simply to keep people updated on our progress. This page will also serve as a repository for all documents that are distributed among the full CBOS-CEID group.
The AWAC/NIP has been delayed- there is a problem with integrating the UWM into the ADCP which Nortek is working on as we speak. I am pushing them to get it to us by the end of march.
I went ahead and ordered a MTRBM from Mooring Systems. I would anticipate delivery mid-march.
I have been back and forth with Oceanscience on our Clamparatus and exactly how many holes we need drilled. It should be shipping soon.
I have been working out the power budget for the buoy deck enclosure, trying to get a sufficiently long lifetime out of whatever battery pack we have on board, which still needs to be determined. Here are the things that are going to take power on the buoy. All current estimates are @12v:
30 November 2004 FINALLY got around to tossing the SeaCat in the water. With the assistance of RC Kidd and Dick Moody, we used the ODU II to string out about 40m of cable under the CCPO dock, then offshore to a small, 140lb concrete platform on which the SeaCat is mounted. There is a cable grip attaching the armored cable to the concrete platform, and another cable grip attaching the pier-end of the cable to a piece of chain wrapped around one of the pilings on the CCPO pier. Underneath the pier, there is a small enclosure with a radio modem, and a 12V lead-acid battery (plus a small voltage logger to keep track of the battery voltage). The modem under the pier is in serial-sleep mode, so it can only be used to transmit. In the next phase, I'll add the 10W solar panel so that we can use as much power as we want...
In Tom Royer's office (on the water side of the building), there is another radio modem, recieving the signal, attached to an old laptop. The laptop is running a simple MATLAB script which waits to hear the signal come in, reads in the data, does some simple processing (like computing salinity, determiming digital yearday), and saves it to a file on the network drive.
In my office, my desktop machine has a cron job running that takes this data, every five minutes, and makes a simple graphic display of the last two days of data.
All of this, in my opinion, is the easy part. The tricky part is going to be in how we handle this data now that it is 'in-house'. I see four significant tasks that need to be tackled well:
23 November 2004 Resubmitted sole-source justification for Nortek ADCP with LinkQuest modems included.
12 November 2004 Have submitted sole-source justification for the Clamparatus
Have revised the budget for the project now that things have settled down a bit and we've made some equipment decisions. Submitted to ODURF.
8 November 2004 Finally got around to submitting a purchase order, quotes, and sole source document for the ADCP.
Also spend a few hours finalizing the enclosure for the CCPO test site. There will be an Onset logger inside the box which will log battery voltage, case temperature, and case humidity, plus the radio.
3 November 2004 Decided to order a inexpensive solar panel with a built-in regulator, namely, the Campbell Scientific CSX10R 10 Watt panel with a built in regulator. This should be more than enough power to keep both a radio modem and acoustic modem going on the buoy deck. Combined, at idle, they consume about 75mW, so even with salt spray, bad angle of incidence, clouds, etc, we should have more than enough power.
28 October 2004 Met this morning with Arnoldo, John, Mike Dinniman, and Michael Ott to discuss the purchase of the ADCP for the CBOS-CEID project. The two real contenders in this are Nortek and RD Instruments. The two units (the Nortek AWAC with an internal processor and an RD workhorse with wave firmware and a NEMO processor) are roughly functionally equivalent. Nortek uses acoustic tracking for it's primary measurement and PUV methods as a secondary, while RD uses PUV as its primary. The Nortek pre-processor is a bit more configurable than the RD, and sounds a bit better develped. The real difference is price: the Nortek is going to run us about $22,000, and the RD would run us around $37,000, minus $6000 if Arnoldo traded in one of his old ADCPs). Since we're a bit tight on the budget for this, we're going to go with the Nortek unit.
It should be noted that the Nortek unit is the demo unit that the various groups deployed a few months ago. I talked with Eric and we will get the full (1 year) warranty on the unit, as if it were new.
By the way, we haven't thought about the sonic anemometer yet. Looks like a 2-D SA from Campbell will run us around $1400.
26 October 2004 The Pelican case enclosure has arrived. Tested the radio inside the enclosure under the dock and indeed the signal strength inside the building is quite strong. Just waiting to get the cable built.
22 October 2004 Looked at the Campbell MSX10R solar panel for the buoy- this would provide more than enough power for a radio and an acoustic modem. It has a built-in regulator and hence all we would need to supply is a 12v battery.
21 October 2004 I have decided that as a useful exercise, we will deploy a radio-linked SeaCat off of the seawall at CCPO. We will place an enclosure under the pier with a radio and a bulkhead connector. Chris has an old piece of armored cable which we will run out to a small platform on which we will mount a SeaCat (which I have). We'll put a radio in Tom's office with an old computer, which Joe has agreed to provide. This will give us some practical experience not only with radio telemetry, but with logging, QA/QC, archiving, and web product development, on a much simpler, accessible system. I've gone ahead and ordered:
Conversations with Paul Devine (RD) and Eric Siegel (Nortek). Paul feels that Nortek's use of AST for wave parameters is a disadvantage since surface bubbles and sediment interfere with surface detection. Not so, says Siegel, as surface reflection is much stronger, and they toss out ambiguous values, which account for about 1% of data during big storms. Plus, AST is one of three methods used to estimate wave parameters, though it is the primary. Anyway, we have data from the AWAC/Triaxys comparison which shows the AWAC performing very well in 2.5m waves.
20 October 2004 Okay, I've had a chance to fool with the radios and they are very cool. They are pretty easy to set up, largely working out of the box. They can, to a large extent, be considered transparent to whatever you are working on once you've played around a bit with configuration. We have two concerns with these: Power usage (at least on the unit which will be on the AtoN) and range. Mark Bushnell warns me that transmission can be a bit tricky, working sometimes and not at others. We're going to borrow some nice antennas from them and test this on the next bay cruise.
I've done some power tests with them. Here are the relevant stats: using a 9v battery to power the unit (which actually was only reading about 6.5v) I got the following current draws:
I have recieved word from Mark Bushnell at NOAA that the CG will very likely approve our request to use "HC" (which stands for "Horseshoe Crossing" in case you wondered).
18 October 2004 To address the issue of the transmission from the AtoN buoy to the CBBT, I've bought, as an experiment, a set of MaxStream Radios, specifically, the 9XStream OEM modules. These are pretty nifty little radios, and I got a development kit consisting of two radios and all the trimmings for $125! Quite a deal. Looking forward to playing with these.
7 October 2004 Okay, I've been collecting quotes and trying to fit this whole project into our restricted budget. We've recieved a lot of offers of support from Eric Siegel at Nortek. Due to our limited technical staff, his offers of support are a real selling point. Here is the current status of the proposed ODU system:
List of CBOS-CEID participants
Summary of 20 September Meeting
Results of the AWAC test in the lower Bay
Quote for trawl-resistant platform
Specs on trawl-resistant platform
