The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution will acquire items of oceanographic instrumentation to be placed in a pool of shared use equipment. This equipment is maintained for use on or in association with the three research vessels operated by the Institution. A substantial part of the ships' operating schedules in recent years and again in 1991 is in support of NSF-sponsored research projects. The instrumentation will also increase the capabilities of the ships and of the institution to support research and engineering activities. The instrumentation includes: -An integrated meteorological sensor and data system (IMET). A modern instrument package will be installed to make underway, continuous measurements of air temperature and humidity, wind velocity, and other variables, -Shipboard data management systems and components for real- time acquisition, management, analysis, and display of large environmental and geophysical data sets, -Water purification system to provide reagent grade pure water for chemical analyses at sea, -Shipboard remote sensing computer and image display equipment to provide scientists on board with near real-time data collected from satellites, -A disk drive system and other peripheral equipment, -Precision acoustic pingers for determining position of an instrument package relative to the surface or seafloor, -Precision temperature and conductivity sensors for continuously monitoring and recording sea surface temperature and salinity while the ship is underway, -replacement water sampling bottles for collecting discrete seawater samples at specific depths, -Satellite communications gear for scientific data transfer and communications ashore, -Underwater spectroradiometer for measuring chlorophyll and other optical properties in the water column, -a deck control unit for a CTD that collects precision Temperature and Conductivity data as a function of Depth, -Box corer for obtaining seafloor sediment samples, -Acoustic command and tracking system for interrogating and activating deployed instruments, -Replacement x-ray tube for fluorescence laboratory, -Grating drive upgrade for inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer, -Calibrated hydrophones for testing ship installed acoustic systems, and -an ultra cold freezer for storing samples during transit from sea to shore laboratory. The instrumentation described above will increase the capability of the organization to support NSF-sponsored research and engineering projects.
