Autonomous Drifting Ocean Station (ADOS)

Clearwater Instrumentation, Inc.

Watertown, MA  

Developed highly-integrated, inexpensive ocean observing platform.

• Low-cost platform that can be used to gather an enhanced suite of data that is essential for integrating present and future satellite measurements of bilogical and physical processes with in situ observations.
• Combines ocean color, surface layer thermal structure, and surface winds sensing elements.
• Provides research and observational communities a multi-parameter observing system with products that can be shared by many programs, thus decreasing costs to each program.
• Achieves low-cost and greatly improved durability by placing autonomous subsurface sensors on inexpensive, robust steel hydrographic wire and facilitating communications between the surface instruments and subsurface components with inductive modem technology.

• Potential utilization for research and applied science such as fisheries biology, both in the United States and abroad.

• A NASA scientific project has recently been funded to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography requiring use of the ADOS. Twenty-four buoys will be produced and deployed.
• Possible application for use by the Naval Oceanographic Office

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