Award Data

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ship groundings can cause sever environmental damage to the delicate ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass beds, and beaches. At present, survey work is performed by hand – a method that is inefficient and difficult to perform reliably. Improved bottom survey tools are clearly needed to evaluate the extent and type of damage and assist in determining remediation efforts. ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: NOAA and the National Weather Service maintain an immense network of automated maritime, surface, and upper-air observing stations throughout the world and at great expense. These automated stations provide regularly updated data for both short-term weather prediction and long-term climate models. Maritime and surface observations occur as frequently as every 10 to 20 minutes, ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Creare proposes to develop a self-sustained small-scale power conversion system to power NOAA’s weather monitoring network stations located in harsh uninhabited locations. Our miniature heat engine will take advantage of the existing year-round thermal gradients found between water and air in Arctic regions. Our baseline approach is the development of a compact Turbo-Rankine ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Ensuring the health of coastal marine ecosystems has emerged as one of the primary environmental concerns of this century. Frequent monitoring of water quality is required to establish baseline levels and enable early detection of problems. Citizen science programs have been shown to provide a highly effective method of monitoring water quality. Creare is developing an open-sou ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Commercially available unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are not well designed to meet requirements for many atmospheric measurement applications, including deployment from ships, long endurance, and low cost. Existing multi-rotor systems suffer from limited payload and endurance. Existing fixed wing systems offer improved endurance and payload, but require significant support h ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Accurate marine weather nowcasts and forecasts are critical requirements for mariners to maintain situational awareness and ensure safe navigation for vessels, passengers, crew, and cargo. To best achieve this, reliable observations of atmospheric and sea conditions must be available at high spatial and temporal coverage. Unfortunately, existing approaches for marine weather ob ...

Next-generation high-performance computing (HPC) hardware, such as the Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing Many-Integrated-Core processor, provide new deep memory architectures that offer the promise of increased performance. The challenge in taking full advantage of this architecture is selecting which data structures will be placed in the high-bandwidth memory. Optimizing data structure placement in ...

Infrasound and seismic measurements are used by DTRA and the DoD for nuclear test monitoring, terrorist blast forensics, battle damage assessment, and environmental monitoring. However, these long wavelength physical signals are typically recorded through single-point sensors or sparse low density arrays. As a result, the critical signals of interest are often corrupted or masked by noise or inter ...

A significant performance gap exists between the theoretical number of Floating Point Operations (FLOPS) that a HPC machine is capable of sustaining and the number of FLOPS realized by real-world HPC applications. One of the principle reasons for this gap is the parasitic work that computational processes must do to communicate with one another. It has been shown that this communication work can b ...

In Phase I of this effort we analyzed the structural response of a BLU 109 during typical penetration events. Based on these finite element results, we proposed and demsonstrated a simple robust concept for a passive penetrator sensor that identifies the material being penetrated and also correlates strongly with its underground trajectory. Such a sensor would obviously provide valuable informatio ...