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These six pages represent
a recreation of a poster created for a ROADNet talk given at the
Fall 2001 American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
ABSTRACT
Recent advances in technology have enabled the exploitation
of satellite communications for high-speed (>64 kbps) duplex
communications with oceanographic ships at sea. Furthermore, decreasing
costs for high-speed communications have made possible continuous
connectivity to the global Internet for delivery of data ashore
and communications with scientists and engineers on the ship. Through
support from the Office of Naval Research, we have planned a series
of tests using the R/V Revelle for real time data delivery of large
quantities of underway data (e.g., continuous multibeam profiling)
to shore for quality control, archiving, and real-time data availability.
The Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics and Planetary
Physics (IGPP) and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) were
funded by the NSF Information Technology Research (ITR) Program,
the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information
Technology [Cal-(IT)2] and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography
for research entitled: "Exploring the Environment in Time:
Wireless Networks & Real-Time Management."
We will describe the technology to be used for the real-time seagoing
experiment and the planned expansion of the project through support
from the ITR grant
The short-term goal
is to exercise the communications system aboard ship in various
weather conditions and sea states while testing and developing the
real-time data quality control and archiving methodology. The long-term
goal is to enable continuous observations in the ocean, specifically
supporting the goals of the DEOS (Dynamics of Earth and Ocean Systems)
observatory program supported through a
NSF Major Research Equipment (MRE) program - a permanent presence
in the oceans. The impact on scientific work aboard ships, however,
is likely to be fundamental. It will be possible to go to sea in
the future with limited engineering capability for scientific operations
by allowing shore-based quality control of data collected and videoconferencing
for problem resolution.
Costs for shipboard measurements will be reduced significantly while,
at the same time, the quality of data collected will increase and
ex-post-facto data archiving will no longer be necessary.
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IMAGE
The communications system installed on the R/V Roger Revelle will
be capable of returning all multibeam data collected aboard in real
time continuously. This will allow monitoring and quality control
of the data collected even when the ship is not being used for geological
and geophysical studies. In the future, data from an interesting area,
like the one shown above (9° N, 104° W), can be sent to shore,
combined with available satellite altimetry predictions and returned
to the ship to assist in refining surveys. View
a larger version of this image.
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