This proposal requests an Ocean Surveyor 150 kHz vessel mounted ADCP for the R/V Cape Hatteras. The current unit onboard the ship failed and per diagnostic testing through the manufacturer, Teledyne RDI, it was determined that the ADCP would need to be replaced. Additionally, this was confirmed upon consultation with University of Hawaii. The Cape Hatteras schedule includes a cruise for Michael Gregg, ORS, from October 31 through November 17 in which a vessel mounted ADCP is critical to their research. There are also at least two scheduled cruises on board the Cape Hatteras for 2012 in which an ADCP is a required piece of equipment. The equipment requested will allow the ship to continue providing ocean scientists with accurate and reliable data.
Broader Impacts: The principal impact of the present proposal is under criterion two, providing infrastructure support for scientists to use the vessel and its shared-use instrumentation in support of their NSF-funded oceanographic research projects (which individually undergo separate review by the relevant research program of NSF). The acquisition, maintenance and operation of shared-use instrumentation allows NSF-funded researchers from any US university or lab access to working, calibrated instruments for their research, reducing the cost of that research, and expanding the base of potential researchers.
. Federal Award ID 1212404. This grant supported the RAPID acquisition of an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP) for use on R/V CAPE HATTERAS, a small coastal zone research vessel that has historically operated on the U.S. East Coast roughly from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean Sea, importantly including the Gulf of Mexico, the site of the recent catastrophic oil well explosion and blowout. The ADCP is an extremely complex acoustic device that determines the speed and direction of various layers of water below an oceanographic ship. The device can be set up to measure the entire water column, but the mode specified for CAPE HATTERAS was a setup that concentrated in the upper 150 m (about 450 ft) of the water column. The ADCP emits a sound signal which penetrates down through the water column. As the sound wave progresses downwards it is reflected by small particles including very small plants and animals. Each reflected sound wave is transmitted back up to a collection of transducers on the ship. The ADCP carries out a Doppler analysis on each reflected particle signal. A Doppler analysis is generated by the Doppler Effect, in which a sound wave reflected by a particle going away from the sensor changes its wave length while a particle going toward the sensor also changes its wave length but in the opposite direction. Importantly the magnitude of the change (in both directions) in wave length is directly proportional to the speed of the reflecting particle. The bottom line is that the ADCP tells physical oceanographers the speed and direction of the entire water column under the ship at intervals of about 30 ft (down to about 450 ft). This information was critically important to understanding where and how fast the oil released from the BP accident was moving.
