Award Data

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Buoyancy driven oceanographic gliders, although reasonably cost effective, have challenges operating in the zones due to high gradients in water density. Under this topic, Riptide will provide a cost-effective autonomous undersea vehicle (AUV) design leveraged from Riptide's family of man-portable AUVs that can more effectively map the hypoxic areas. The stated goals of this to ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Triton Systems, Inc. proposes development of the Open-Source Oceanographic Asset Recovery Beacon (OpenORB) that will allow the deployment of coastal instrumentation moorings with affordable protection against loss. This open-source kit would significantly reduce the purchase price of a commercial location beacon by allowing the end-user to assemble a customized system with mini ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Poor air quality represents a major public health risk, contributing to an estimated one of every eight deaths worldwide. Low-cost air quality sensors have developed rapidly over the last few years and offer the opportunity to make air quality monitoring inexpensive and widespread. However, low-cost sensors are currently unable to deliver accurate, reliable data due to a lack o ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Recent advances in gas chromatographic (GC) and mass spectrometric (MS) techniques for atmospheric measurements have led to highly complex data sets that have overwhelmed the capabilities of current data analysis software. We propose a new method for the automated reduction of chromatographic data using peak-fitting algorithms. By relying upon constrained peak-fit parameterizat ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: We propose to continue the development of a generalized 3DVAR data assimilation module, in an open-source and non-proprietary programming language, which is compatible with FVCOM and incorporated into the Lake Erie Operational Forecast System (LEOFS). We will leverage our experience and expertise in using 3DVAR for a ROMS-based real-time forecast system for the California coast ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Tropospheric oxidation capacity is dominated by HOx photochemistry, however halogen atoms and oxides significantly affect these chemical cycles. A sensitive and robust measurement of gaseous HCl is critically important to improve our understanding of halogen chemistry and its impacts on the spatial and temporal oxidation capacity of the atmosphere. In Phase I, we met all of our ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: We propose to develop and commercialize the next generation of low cost, low power, ruggedized, and accurate phytoplankton single cell and whole colony counting, characterization and classification system called HABStats. We will accomplish this using the following three unique and innovative approaches: 1) High-throughput color, Light Field Imaging Flow Cytometry to acquire mo ...

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to the atmosphere are primary drivers of global climate change and hence there is a crucial need to quantify their sources and sinks. A general technique to constrain source and sink strengths is the analysis of the relative proportions of isotopic variants of GHG's. These measurements must be performed with extremely high precision. The gold standard technique, i ...

There are currently no inexpensive observing systems that detect temperature, salinity and currents under the ocean's surface - all important factors in predicting the intensity of hurricanes. Boston Engineering proposes to develop the Multi-Purpose Above Surface/Below Surface Expendable Dropsondes (MASED). Our design builds on the highly successful air dropsondes already in use, combined with a ...

The objective of the proposed work is to determine whether Dioxide Materials' miniature C02 sensors have the potential to be adapted for autonomous measurement of ocean carbon. The existing sensors have many advantages for measurements of ocean carbon. They are much smaller and less costly than the existing sensors, work with much smaller gas samples, and use much less power. The sensors were d ...