Today is an exciting day, we’ve just started retrieving our first mooring. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain what a mooring actually is. For our experiment we have deployed five moorings to monitor the East Australia Current, our mooring array looks like…
[caption id=”attachment_430” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”]
image: Danny McLaughlan[/caption]
What does each item record? How much do they cost?
Starmon mini
Records: temperature and no pressure
Sample time: five minutes
Response time: 30 seconds
Accuracy: 50/1000 degree
Cost: $800
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Starmon’s record temperature.[/caption]
Seabird SBE37SMP
Records: pressure, temperature and conductivity.
Sample time: ten minutes
Response time: milliseconds
Accuracy: 1/1000 degree
Cost: $8,000
[caption id=”attachment_434” align=”aligncenter” width=”300”]
Seabird’s record pressure, temperature and conductivity.[/caption]
Aquadopp
Records: single point current, temperature, pressure and depth
Sample time and output: every 30 seconds to output an average every 30 minutes
Accuracy: 100/1000 degree
Cost: $16,000
[caption id=”attachment_427” align=”aligncenter” width=”200”]
Aquadopp’s record single point current, temperature, pressure and depth.[/caption]
Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP)
Records: velocity profile and pressure
3 different sorts:
- WH300 and BB150
- Range: 300/150 metres (respectively). Price: $40,000-50,000
- LR 75
- Range: 600 metres. Price: $80,000.
Sample time and output: every 15 minutes to output average hourly
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Acoustic Doppler Current Profilers records water velocity and pressure.[/caption]
**Acoustic release (two on every mooring for redundancy) **
Function: when release signal is detected, anchor is detached from mooring so that the buoyancy on the mooring makes the mooring float to the surface.
Cost: $18,000
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Acoustic release.[/caption]
Buoyancy
Benthos glass floats ($600-800 each) and syntactic spheres ($12,000-$18,000). We can see what a syntactic spheres looks like in the ADCP picture above. The wire costs $3.15 a metre and the Dynex $3.45 a metre.
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Benthos glass floats (buoyancy)[/caption]
Exeos equipment
Function: help locate the mooring when the top is at the surface.
Instruments are: led flasher, vhf beacon and sable (gps) – $1500, $1500 and $8000 respectively.
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Exeos led flasher, vhf beacon and sable.[/caption]
Check out our interview with moorings engineer Andreas Marouchos, we have a chat about the technical challenges with designing and deploying moorings.
In category: Southern_Surveyor