WETSAT Uses Revolutionary Technology To Upgrade LEO-15

Sea Technology, Mar 2005

WETSAT Inc. (Saunderstown, Rhode Island), in collaboration with Satlantic (Halifax, Canada) and WET Labs (Philomath, Oregon), recently announced its new academic/industrial partnership with Rutgers University to upgrade their Long-Term Ecosystem Observatory at 15 meters (LEO-15) program. WETSAT has been contracted by Rutgers to provide a state-of-the-art turn-key observatory replacement for the current system.

"The current system was visionary. Revolutionary in its time, and designed by Fred Grassle and Chris von Alt, LEO-15 has served the scientific community well for over a decade," said Dr. Scott Glenn, a professor at Rutgers University and LEO chief scientist.

The new system will enable operators to monitor and control the underwater observatory securely and remotely, while providing real-time data to users worldwide via the Internet. Information from this system will work to provide a picture of the underwater environment to scientists, educators and others around the world.

LEO-15 is an electro-optic cabled underwater ocean observing system that consists of a suite of sophisticated marine instrumentation connected to a node on the seafloor. Located in the coastal waters of New Jersey, the system provides real-time information for rapid environmental assessment and physical/biological forecasting.

WETSAT will provide their Scientific Instrument Interface Module (SUM) and Data Acquisition and Control Network (DACNet) Ocean Observatory Operating System. These tools will work to improve the available experiment bandwidth, power monitoring and control, and enable data collection, processing and real-time data viewing via the Internet.

The SUM is a modular, scalable underwater sensor-interfacing tool for cabled observatories and other real-time acquisition applications. This interface tool will feed into the "brain" of the system, DACNet, that resides on the shore station server. DACNet, developed by Satlantic, has already been utilized in various observatory programs (both moored and cabled) in Canada, the Mediterranean, and the eastern United States. According to WETSAT, DACNet automatically controls all sensor scheduling and performs data-handling functions from collection to storage and realtime forwarding to designated users. Authorized operators can control, monitor and configure the infrastructure and sensors remotely, from virtually any computer on the Internet. Authorized users can monitor the sensors and receive e-mail updates of critical events in the ocean.

The real-time capabilities of LEO-15 allow for adaptive sampling of episodic events and integration into ocean forecast models. WETSAT maintains that the goal of this observatory to produce a picture of the underwater environment as detailed as that which a human has of the world above the ocean, with the information presented on time and distance scales important to individual organisms. This observatory is one part of the expanding network of ocean observatories that will form the basis of a national observation network.

For more information, visit www.wetsat.com.