Award Data

The SBIR solicitation expressed the need for tools to process data from disparate sources in various formats and generate drought-relevant data products. NIDIS also recognizes a need to span organizational boundaries to provide access to integrated drought information for use in water management. The Phase I SBIR project resulted in prototype Climate Information Management Toolkit (CIMT) software ...

An operational optical particle counter will be built, extensively characterized and evaluated that measures the size and shape of aerosol particles with optical diameter from 0.1 to 10 μm. This instrument will distinguish different species of dust and volcanic ash from other types of aerosol particles, and provide an estimate of the aerosol optical properties and produce compositional informati ...

This Phase II SBIR will execute the research to commercialization process developed in Phase I, when WorldWinds, Inc. developed and implemented a procedure to showcase graphical NOAA products for on-air consumption by the general public. Through collaboration with Baron Services, Inc., of Huntsville, AL, the Phase I project developed a prototypical composite Blended Total Precipitable Water produ ...

Over 300 HF RADARs worldwide are producing ocean surface data that is used in oil spill response, search & rescue, vessel traffic management, and research. In the U.S. there are 100+ systems supplying real-time data to the Coast Guard, NOAA IOOS, OR&R and other operational groups. To provide the highest quality data to stakeholders, systems should be calibrated by measuring the receive antenna p ...

This Phase II research expands Phase I research on Saccharina latissima and is to design and develop “seed” nursery methodologies for the development of commercial-scale production of juvenile kelp plants including Alaria esculenta and Laminaria digitata. The project objectives include: 1. Isolate and maintain cultures of New England species of Alaria esculenta and laminaria digitata to be use ...

Oscilla Power, Inc. (OPI) is developing a utility-scale wave energy harvester that is enabled by low cost and readily-available magnetostrictive alloys. T his device, which utilizes no moving parts, has the potential to deliver predictable quantities of electric power to coastal utilities, industrial users, and remote facilities at costs competitive with coal or gas. The Phase I project demonstra ...

Marine aquaculture production now exceeds 20 million metric tons annually (FAO 2010) but viral diseases are still a major threat to the expansion of sustainable mariculture systems (National Marine Fisheries Service 2007). Pathogenic viruses continue to devastate many fish and shellfish operations every year (ICES Mariculture Committee 2004, Lightner 2011). To date, vaccines against aquatic anim ...

Toyon proposes to develop software that can process infrared video streams to automatically detect gray whale blows. Additionally, the software will count the number of blows and estimate the speed and the number of whales that are present. We will make use of a novel technique for whale blow detection that Toyon has demonstrated on infrared video of humpback whales. The approach makes use of b ...

One of the most promising biomass sources for fuels and other feedstocks is photosynthetic algae. Algae can produce lipids, proteins, and other compounds, and can be grown in salt water. Current production practices rely on expensive means of harvesting, concentrating, and extracting the algae. This makes the “bio-crude” produced by algae more expensive than petroleum. Recovering the cellular ...

The gray whale migration generates many hours of video that must be examined carefully to identify passing whales and get an accurate count of their numbers. Unfortunately, humans lack the necessary attention span. To solve this problem, a detector will be developed that can process hours of video, detecting whale blows while minimizing false positives and negatives. With an accurate record of ...