Intellectual Merit: This work is a five-year renewal of support for the development and maintenance of the MB-system, an open source, freely available software package for the processing and display of swath mapping sonar data. It includes the development of functionality as well as visualization tools for editing bathymetry, analyzing sonar bias parameters, and real-time survey display. The work permits on-going user support, improvement of software documentation, and support for new sonar data formats. The heart of the system is an input/output library that allows programs to work transparently with any of the 61 supported swath sonar data formats. Through this approach, generic utilities can be developed that can be applied in a uniform manner to sonar data from a variety of sources. Data to which this software is applied includes bathymetry, beam intensity, and sides can data.
Broader Impacts: Broader impacts of the work are increasing the infrastructure for science, serving the needs of researchers using multi-beam sonar data for marine geology and geophysics research, and facilitating data analysis and visualization. This work supports researchers at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory in New York and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.
Research and Education Activities: The MB-System is an open source UNIX software package consisting of programs that manipulate, process, list, or display swath mapping sonar bathymetry and sidescan data. Over the past nineteen years, NSF support has allowed us to develop MB-System from a poorly documented and limited set of homegrown programs into a package that is widely used in the US and international marine geology and geophysics (MG&G) community. This award supported continued development and support of the MB-System software package for five years. We have continued to fix problems, support new data formats, add new functionality, build documentation, and distribute the open source code distribution. We released several major and dozens of minor updates over the past five years. The most recent release was 5.3.1906 on September 28, 2011. The current suite of MB-System tools and their capabilities are listed in the MB-System web pages (www.mbari.org/data/mbsystem/). Findings: The popularity of MB-System has continued to grow during this project. Our download statistics and email over the past year indicate that the software is used by researchers and graduate students at universities, research institutions, and government agencies in the U.S. and around the world. We have documented current use at 44 academic institutions in the U.S. and 66 abroad, by 11 U.S. government agencies and 34 non-U.S. government agencies, and by 36 companies. Some additional indications of the software's broad acceptance include: (1) The National Geophysical Data Center requests that multibeam bathymetry submitted to its archive be in one of the data formats supported by MB-System. (2) The MB-System Discussion forum (http://listserver.shore.mbari.org/read/?forum=mbsystem) has 233 registered members, and has had 326 posts in the first nine months of 2011. Training and Development: Many of the remote users that we assist by email are students using MB-System to support on-going research efforts. They sometimes learn important computing skills through this effort in addition to improving their understanding of the multibeams and data processing. Outreach Activities: MB-System users constantly email us with questions and problems. We deal with numerous users each week from around the world. This effort amounts to providing swath-mapping education on demand for the international MG&G community. The MB-System Cookbook document incorporates many examples and explanations developed during support activities over the years. As part of our support for science and multibeam operations on the USCG Healy, we have provided a significant amount of training. Many of these informal training activities are now based on content that is in the MB-System Cookbook and some have lead to inclusion of new material in the cookbook. We have also performed training sessions for the multibeam technicians of Raytheon Polar Services that support NSF-funded seafloor surveys as part of the US Antarctic Program.
