A Mooring Development and Implementation Case Study of a Government/Private Partnership

Abstract

Abstract In today's world where there is an increasing need to monitor and understand our changing oceans, under flat or shrinking budgets, it is challenging for a single organization to tackle problems of this scale and magnitude alone. Engineers and scientists from the National Oceantic and Atmospheric Administration's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) began a collaboration with this challenge in mind. The collaboration took advantage of each organization's strengths: MBARI has the capability to rapidly develop new instrument systems, and NDBC has the infrastructure on which to test their capabilities in the field. Here, we present development efforts that led to the deployment of a small partial pressure of carbon dioxide (pCO2) sensor system developed by MBARI on an NDBC buoy. The overarching goal was to demonstrate the utility of NDBC's new Auxiliary (Aux) module and determine the ease of adding third-party instrumentation to NDBC buoys. The Aux module is part of NDBC's latest generation of weather buoy data acquisition and reporting system, which provides more modularity and flexibility over previous systems. Given the large number of NDBC buoys currently in service, this capability opens up the possibility of a dense array of low-cost sensors to complement more highly specialized expensive mooring systems that are sparsely distributed. The partnership process led to the successful deployment of the pCO2 system on NDBC buoy 46013 off Bodega Bay, California, about 48 nautical miles northwest of San Francisco, for over a year of unattended operation. The technical and scientific results are described.