MRI: Acquisition of Sensors for an Oceanographic Moored Array Constituting an Integrated Research Instrument

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The Physical Oceanography Observing Laboratory (POOL) of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is a virtual facility that maintains and provides moored instrumentation to U.S. investigators conducting research supported by the National Science Foundation. Companion groups at WHOI construct mooring elements, go to sea to deploy and recover moorings and, if requested by the principal investigator, extract and process the data from the moored instrumentation and make them ready for scientific analysis. The present inventory of POOL instrumentation is fully committed to ongoing projects, so POOL will be unable to support any new initiatives in the coming several years. The PI's requests funding to enhance and renew WHOI POOL instrumentation to replace some aging equipment a single mooring system, an array that can be flexibly deployed to accommodate the sampling requirements for a broad range of phenomenon. The WHOI POOL has been developed to support researchers throughout the country wishing to make time-series measurements of the ocean. The acquisition of the proposed instrumentation will significantly improve the ability of WHOI's technical groups to support leading-edge research.Broader ImpactsA wide range of NSF-funded projects will require the services that will be available through the proposed activities. It is stated that the new inventory of equipment proposed for purchase will aid the physical oceanography community in a variety of projects in the future, and not just researchers at WHOI. There is no question that large or small institution- graduate and undergraduate students' exposure to modern instrumentation is a plus for the proposed acquisition. This is especially important for smaller institutions, which rely on WHOI to supply and maintain a suite of measurement hardware.