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: The NOAA Integrated Earth System Process and Predictions 2018 Subtopic 8.1.1 “Radio Occultation from Recoverable Air Balloons for Weather Applications” solicitation has the goal of demonstrating the feasibility of a hardware/software system for a balloon platform that has sufficient quality for measuring global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals to enable retrieval ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: This project will develop and demonstrate an inexpensive and portable calibration system for low-cost aerosol sensors. Current calibration methods are cost prohibitive and impractical for widespread field deployment. Access Sensor Technologies (AST) proposes to produce a solar powered aerosol reference calibrator (SPARC) that builds upon a established (patent pending) technolog ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: Accurate knowledge of water levels is crucial for day-to-day operations and planning of many US coastal activities. This information is used for the safe navigation of thousands of vessels on a daily basis, including passage of large vessels and cargos under and around coastal and river infrastructures. The NOAA Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (COOPS) ...

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: Previous efforts have demonstrated that targeted observations of tropical storms by UAS can provide extremely valuable data sets for improving forecasts and models, but are also difficult to obtain. A number of obstacles including regulations and the distance required to intercept evolving storms have limited the number of land based flights. The use of airborne deployed UAS ha ...

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT: We believe that employing current molecular biology techniques it is possible to develop plasmid DNA based positive control standard kits for a wide variety molecular assays for environmental organisms, and that this represents a significant commercial opportunity. In Phase I we demonstrated that plasmid DNA-based qPCR positive controls are stable, perform as well as genomic DN ...

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 ...