August 2015 - Marine Technology Reporter

MTR100: Sea-Bird Scientific

Posted by Irina Tabakina

Over 40+ years, Sea-Bird Scientific has developed award-winning technologies to solve the most difficult problems in natural water.  Its CTDs are the centerpiece of most oceanographic moorings, AUVs and profiling systems.  The global Argo Array, with unprecedented accuracy and stability in temperature and salinity, has enabled scientists to detect ocean climate trends not previously possible.
Sea-Bird Scientific combines the capabilities of Sea-Bird Electronics, WET Labs, and Satlantic to provide sensors and systems for oceanographic research and environmental water quality monitoring of physical and biogeochemical properties. Today Sea-Bird Scientific employs more than 200 people in the U.S., Canada, and Europe in the development, manufacture, calibration, sales, and support of our products. We provide products and services through two commercial businesses:
•    The Ocean Research Business Unit works with our research and oceanographic customer base and remains the source of most of the core products and services of Sea-Bird Electronics, WET Labs, and Satlantic. It also manages the firms’ growing capabilities in autonomous platforms and sensors.
•    The Sea-Bird Coastal Business Unit addresses the emerging requirements for improved monitoring of the world’s coastal margin zones and inland waters.
Our customers include universities and research institutes; ocean observing programs; national, regional, and local government agencies/departments; energy companies; engineering firms; environmental consulting businesses; and navies throughout the world. Our products are used in numerous critical environmental research and monitoring efforts, ranging from determining the ocean’s role in, and the associated impact from, climate changes to the monitoring of environmental impacts of major episodic events such as oil spills and tsunamis.
Sea-Bird Scientific has an extensive internal science team, with a number of Ph.D. oceanographers spanning several focus areas to determine scientific requirements for our instruments, test and evaluate prototypes, oversee production calibration processes, and answer questions from scientists using our instruments around the world.  As a member of Team Durafet, we have been selected as a finalist for the $2M Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a global competition to create pH sensor technology that will accurately measure ocean acidification. Team Durafet includes representatives from Honeywell, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), as well as Sea-Bird Scientific. Other key oceanographic parameters measured by our instruments include temperature, salinity, pressure, oxygen, pH, fluorescence, turbidity, nitrate, phosphate, and irradiance. Its instruments are used on shipboard profiling systems, moored platforms, autonomous floats, and moored profilers. Sea-Bird Scientific also manufactures several platforms for integration with sensors, including autonomous profiling floats and moored profilers.

 

The MTR100 is Marine Technology Reporter's Annual report on 100 leading companies in the subsea industry, published in the July/August 2015 edition of MTR - http://www.marinetechnologynews.com/Magazine

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