Moored Buoy

The WHOI Mooring Operations and Engineering Group has developed a quiet moored buoy design for a variety of acoustic applications. The DMON instrument is mounted on a large weighted aluminum frame that sits on the sea floor. This frame is attached to a surface buoy via a "stretch hose" with helical electromagnetic conductors embedded in the walls of the hose.

The hose can stretch to nearly twice its relaxed length and is thus capable of decoupling the motions of the surface buoy from the mooring line below the subsurface float. This ensures a quiet acoustic environment for passive acoustic monitoring. The conductors in the stretch hose and electromagnetic cable allow (1) power to be delivered to the DMON from the alkaline battery pack in the surface buoy well, and (2) detection data to be delivered from the DMON/LFDCS to a data logger in the surface buoy. The data logger continuously collects and stores these data and eventually transmits them to a shore-side computer via an Iridium satellite modem on a pre-determined schedule (typically once every 2 hours, but the system is capable of transferring data every 10 minutes as well).

Publications:

Baumgartner, M.F., J. Bonnell, S.M. Van Parijs, P.J. Corkeron, C. Hotchkin, K. Ball, L.-P. Pelletier, J. Partan, D. Peters, J. Kemp, J. Pietro, K. Newhall, A. Stokes, T.V.N. Cole, E. Quintana, and S.D. Kraus. 2019. Persistent near real-time passive acoustic monitoring for baleen whales from a moored buoy: system description and evaluation. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 00:1-14, doi: 10.1111/2041-210X.13244.