IMOS - AUV SIRIUS CAMPAIGN: TASMANIA, OCTOBER 2008

Researchers: Williams, Stefan (Principal investigator) ,  Williams, Stefan (Principal investigator) ,  AODN Data Manager (Point of contact, Distributes) ,  Data Officer (Point of contact, Distributes) ,  Data Officer (Point of contact, Distributes)
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Brief description AUV Sirius (IMOS Platform code: SIRIUS) spent two weeks in Tasmania in October 2008 surveying sites as part of the Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility (CERF) Marine Biodiversity Research Hub. The AUV deployments focused on sites along the Tasman Peninsula in South East Tasmania and in the Huon Marine Protected Area (MPA). The objective of the cruise was to describe biological assemblages associated with rocky reef systems in deep shelf waters beyond normal diving depths. Detailed multibeam mapping of the survey areas had been undertaken prior to the AUV deployment to determine suitable survey locations and to identify any hazards to operation. At each location, multiple reefs were selected for detailed survey work at a range of depths from approximately 50 m to 150 m. Dive profiles were designed to include sufficient replication to quantitatively determine abundances of key species/features within depth strata, within reefs, between reefs (km to 100 km scale), and between differing levels of reef complexity. Over the course of the 10 days of operation, the vehicle undertook 19 dives and visited all the sites of interest identified prior to the voyage. At the conclusion of the trip the dataset included over 1TB of geotiff imagery, multibeam, AUV tracks, 3D textured meshes and hydrographical data. The sites visited in October 2008 were: - Waterfall Bay - O'Hara Reef - Patch-Reef-North - Hippo North - Chevron Rock - Little Hippo North - Little Hippo South East - Hippo South - Chevron Rock South - Blowhole - Sisters - Port Arthur Channel - Port Arthur Patch-Reef - High Yellow - Butt's Reef - Zuid Pool - Butt's Pockmarks

Lineage Maintenance and Update Frequency: asNeeded

Lineage Statement: This data is provided by the IMOS AUV Facility and was collected by the University of Sydney's Australian Centre for Field Robotics aboard the TAFI Research Vessel R/V Challenger. The AUV Sirius undertook seafloor survey deployments along the Tasmanian Peninsula, at Port Arthur and in the Huon Channel between October 5th and 16th, 2008. This represents a first pass processing completed while onboard the ship. A more thorough revision may be available in the future. In all 19 dives were completed, in addition to a number of calibration dives which are not contained on this disk. Each mission has been processed to generate a dive report, dive tracks, geotifs and meshes. Multibeam and hydrographic data have been completed for some but not all dives. The structure of each dive summary is as follows: .pdf - a report outlining the dive. This shows some dive stats (date, time, depth, number of images, distance travelled, etc.), the raw mission profile, a depth profile, the hydrographic data and the reprocessed navigation data where available. .kml - this is a kml file of the vehicle path that can be loaded into Google Earth. _latlong.csv - this is comma separated value file containing a summary of the imagery collected by the vehicle during the dive. This is a result of the output of the renavigation and should be self-consistent where loop closures were identified. USBL and GPS observations have also been fused into the navigation filter. The csv file contains data for each image including the date and time, local northing and easting in metres, depth, latitude and longitude, roll, pitch, heading, altitude and the names of the two stereo images. hydro/ct.csv - a csv containing the conductivity and temperature measurements taken during the dive. These include the date and time, interpolated northing and easting, depth, latitude and longitude, conductivity, temperature measurements and salinity, pressure and speed of sound. hydro/eco.csv - a csv containing the ecopuck fluorometer measurements. These include the date and time, interpolated northing and easting, depth, latitude and longitude, chlorophyll-a, backscatter (red), cdom and temperature (note that this particular sensor does not measure temperature and this field is filled with a dummy value). i_gtif - this directory contains geotiffs of the left, colour images collected during the dive. These contain georeferencing tags generated by the navigation. If loaded into a GIS they should be displayed at the correct geographic location. The image footprint accounts for the field of view of the camera and the measured altitude of the vehicle, The encoding within each image is PNG and should be viewable in a standard image viewer. mb - this directory contains GRD files of the multibeam data, intensities and associated variances. mesh - this directory contains a mesh of the data based on the navigation and the stereo reconstructions. These can be viewed using the osgsight utility by loading the final.ive file. The mesh will show the local stereo surface with associated texture maps.

Notes Credit
Australia’s Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). It is operated by a consortium of institutions as an unincorporated joint venture, with the University of Tasmania as Lead Agent.

Notes Credit
Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR)

Notes Credit
Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility (CERF) Marine Biodiversity Research Hub

Data time period: 05 10 2008 to 16 10 2008

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147.5845,-43.1185

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