SALP: A Submerged Autonomous Launch Platform for Drifting Instrumentation

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P.I. FratantoniOCE-0136255Satellite-tracked surface drifters, acoustically tracked subsurface floats, and a growing family of actively ballasted profiling floats provide an effective and relatively inexpensive means of describing the ocean environment over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Many coastal and blue-water process studies require (or would benefit from) the repetitive deployment of drifting instrumentation over periods of days to years. At best, reliance on ships and/or aircraft for serial instrument deployment can be expensive and logistically difficult. At worst, ship-based deployments may be impossible in remote locations, areas of unfavorable weather or seasonal ice cover, or in response to episodic events such as severe storms. To address this problem this proposal outlines an effort to develop and field-test a compact, low-cost moored platform capable of launching an arbitrary mixture of drifting instruments (e.g. surface drifters, RAFOS floats, profiling PALACE floats) over an extended time period. The Submerged Autonomous Launch Platform (SALP), deployed at depths as great as 2000 m on a standard oceanographic mooring, will enable floats and drifters to be launched (a) by time according to a user- defined schedule, (b) by real-time acoustic remote-control, or (c) adaptively on the basis of local environmental conditions. It is believed that the development of SALP will provide broad benefit to the oceanographic community by facilitating intensive and cost-effective studies of ocean circulation in rapidly changing, geographically remote, or environmentally hostile regions, and will enable investigators to address difficult research problems that are presently financially or logistically untenable. As a component of an autonomous ocean observing system, SALP will allow investigators to project and maintain an interactive presence at sea while promoting the eff