3-D mapping of sea ice draft with an autonomous underwater vehicle

Brief description

We set out to achieve floe-scale 3-D mapping of sea ice draft and bio-optical parameters using a Multibeam SONAR and Hyperspectral radiometer mounted to an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV). The AUV utilised was the 'JAGUAR' Seabed-class vehicle from the Deep Submergence Laboratory at the WoodsHole Oceanographic Institution. The AUV comes with a CTD and ADCP. However these are not deployed as scientific sensors and therefore are unsupported in terms of metadata. In particular the CTD was not calibrated before or during the voyage. The AUV used a LongBaseLine system formed by three transponders to navigate to and from the survey grid. Two were located on the ice and the third was deployed from the back of the ship with an acoustic communications modem. Once at the survey grid beneath the sea ice, the AUV used the DVL to navigate using bottom-tracking of the underside of the sea ice. We conducted 4 missions beneath sea-ice during the SIPEX-II voyage. The current status of the data is that is in un-processed and unavailable until final processing is completed in 2013. Persons interested in the data should contact Dr Guy Williams directly for further information and preliminary figures relating to the AUV missions. The files currently in the archive are in raw form. Some preliminary data is provided for stations 2, 3, 4 and 6 as: floe-2-20120926.mat floe-3-20121003.mat floe-4-20121006.mat floe-6-20121013.mat These can be accessed using the Seabed_plot routines (MATLAB) in this folder. There is a readme file provided called what-is-this.txt Also included is the video footage taken from the AUV using a GoPro HD Hero. Video Codec: avc1 Resolution: 1920x1080 pixels Frame Rate: 29.970030 f/s Audio Codec: mp4a Audio Bitrate: 1536 kb/s Finally, plots of the data for ice stations 2,3,4 and 6 are included in the preliminary figures folder. The file names indicate which ice station the plots are from.