Improved Marine Profiler

Inventors: John Toole, Kenneth Doherty, Jeffrey O'Brien, and Frederik Thwaites

Overview: Marine profilers autonomously sample the water column while propelled along a fixed mooring. Onboard sensing capabilities may include seawater conductivity, temperature, current speed and direction, chlorophyll fluorescence, turbidity, photosynthetically active radiation and dissolved oxygen. Existing profiler designs are generally high-drag and inadequate when operating in strong currents, causing the profiler to produce unreliable data.

Technology: The Improved Marine Profiler enables longer deployment times and significantly improved data. This low-drag, flow-aligning profiler pivots both horizontally and vertically to orient with the incident current flow to minimize drag. By naturally orienting into the surrounding current flow, the new design also improves the quality of data from sensors mounted on its nose.  Any turbulence generated from the mooring wire or vehicle body are downstream from the sensing volume of the probes.