New developments in expendable oceanographic sensors and data acquisition systems

The ability to collect, process, display, distribute and store oceanographic data at sea in real time has always been critical to meet the ever changing environmental requirements of the tactical, scientific and commercial offshore communities. With the development of the expendable bathythermooraph (XBT) by Sippican, Inc. back in 1962, profiles of ocean temperature could be collected at ship speeds up to 30 kts in virtually any weather. Data recording systems provided a hard copy trace on pressure sensitive paper, which required time consuming and expensive digitization before archiving. Over 5 million XBT profiles were analyzed using this technique. In recent years with the advent and adaptation of new solid state sensors for sound velocity, salinity, current velocity, optical properties and sediment characterization along with new microprocessor based acquisition systems, it is now possible to collect display and process a wide range of oceanographic parameters at sea.