A request is made to fund additional and back-up instrumentation for the R/V Cape Hatteras, a 136-ft long research vessel owned by the National Science Foundation and operated by the Duke/UNC Oceanographic Consortium as part of the University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System (UNOLS) research fleet. Five items were submitted for review. In order of priority they were:
1) Transmissometer $4,057 2) Ocean Instruments Multi-Corer 800 $ 35,845 3) Ocean Instruments Mark-III Box Corer $ 34,980 4) pH sensor $1,455 5) Fluorometers-CTD & Flow-through $ 29,733 TOTAL $106,070
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 1216917.This grant supported acquisition of state of the art oceanographic equipment for R/V CAPE HATTERAS, a small coastal zone research vessel operating on the U.S. East Coast roughly from Nova Scotia to the Caribbean Sea, including the Gulf of Mexico. The research completed successfully during this period included the mark and recapture studies of striped bass, an important recreational sport fish; studies of the coastal physical oceanographic properties focused at several locations of interest to the U.S. Navy; and a variety of other projects focusing on continental shelf geology, biology and chemistry. The research completed on R/V CAPE HATTERAS with this oceanographic instrumentation was basic research that provides the fundamental understanding that makes more focused applied research possible in the coastal and continental shelf waters off the U.S. East Coast. The societal importance of this basic research is that continental shelf waters are the site of the most intense multiple use conflicts. The shelf waters are intensely used for a wide variety of recreational uses, fisheries, transportation, national defense and potentially energy extraction. The continental shelf from Nova Scotia to Cape Fear has been proposed for the location of large scale offshore wind turbines for the purpose of providing electrical power. Before these giant utility programs can be improved it is necessary to document with great care the submarine geology of the mid-continental shelf region along with the current regimes that these large wind farms will inhabit. Such wind farms, with their support structures of large rocks, are proposed to provide artificial reefs that will greatly enhance the abundance of marine fish and invertebrates. Biological surveys on a scale not yet carried out anywhere on the East Coast will be required to determine whether or not the wind farms will have this proposed societal benefit.
