Page 39: of Marine Technology Magazine (April 2012)

www.seadiscovery.com Marine Technology Reporter 39Slocum Glider Tech fo OOI Teledyne RD Instruments (RDI) said that engineering and field work is underway to test the full integration of Teledyne RDIs Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) into the Teledyne Webb Research Slocum Glider. Last year, Teledyne Webb Research was chosen by The Consortium for Ocean Leadership and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to provide its coastal G2 Slocum gliders for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The gliders will support the Pioneer and the Endurance Arrays of the Coastal and Global Scale Nodes (CGSN) of the OOI. The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a multi-scale observatory that will use a network of sensor systems to collect physical, chemical, geological and biological data from the ocean and the seafloor on coastal, regional and global scales. Teledyne Webb Researchs Slocum G2 gliders are designed for long deployment endurance with the ability to maneuver and operate where the total water depth is less than 30m and up to 1000m along deeper coastlines. The vehicle construction facilitates swappable payload bays for a multitude of integrated sensor suites. Included in the sensor package is Teledyne RDIs ADCP, which was specified to provide the program with current profiling data. This contract, and the resulting engineering effort, will provide for a fully inte- grated ADCP with bottom tracking capability that will be used to collect high resolution current profiling data from a glider platform. Removing the platform motion is of critical importance to the success of the application and early testing in shallow water has shown that an initial implementation of the techniques developed by the Lowered ADCP community is yielding good results. Testing of the prototype Slocum G2 glider is currently underway, with the deliv- ery of up to 24 units in support of this program.