Award Data

Monitoring bathymetry changes in shipping channels of rivers and estuaries is vital to the US economy. The standard method of sonar depth sounding from survey ships, though accurate, is slow to perform. Thus, we propose a new and innovative approach for rapid assessment of shipping channel morphology from the kinematics associated with remote sensing of the interaction of Kelvin wakes from boats ...

A new, solid-state, carbon dioxide (CO2) sensor for use with closed circuit mixed gas rebreathers is proposed. This novel, polymer composite sensor will be small, low power, and low cost. This sensor will be incorporated with closed circuit rebreathers, allowing the NOAA Advanced Diving Program to perform longer, deeper dives. The use of closed circuit rebreathers provide many advantages over d ...

Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. (IOS) proposes to develop a highly reliable, high fidelity, fiber optic hydrophone-based sensor that will consume low power, and offer a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the frequency range desired for monitoring marine acoustics. There is a need to advance the state-of-the-are of low power, portable hydrophones for recording fish spawning calls. Autonomous u ...

Two, complementary techniques are proposed that are deployable on dropsondes or mobile measurement platforms and measure the scattering coefficient of atmosphere aerosols. The Phase I activity will be a proof of concept study that evaluates the relative strengths and weaknesses of the two measurement systems and combines a detailed analysis of the optical and electronic systems with a laboratory ...

In recent years, there has been increasing concern about the role of man-made sound on the marine environment. For this effort, we propose developing an intuitive software interface for sound propagation modeling. This will be based on software developed at HLS Research, Inc. for similar applications. The software will use existing propagation modeling codes that have a long history in the unde ...

Water managers are increasingly recognizing climate change as a significant issue and are requesting detailed information about potential hydrologic impacts suitable for inclusion in planning. Available studies, however, are most often academic in nature and have the added limitation of being incompatible with agency specific water management models or the streamflow period of interest. Commissi ...

A novel chemical vapor deposition (CVD) based step-flow epitaxy process is proposed for controllable growth of SiC nanowires with high polytype integrity. SiC nanowires will be grown in a modified commercial high-temperature CVD reactor, used by industry for growing high-quality SiC epitaxial thin films. Different polytypes of SiC nanowires will be grown by choosing appropriate substrate materials ...

VIPA etalons are simple, compact devices that offer many times more dispersion than gratings and are finding increasing application where higher spectral resolution is needed. Current VIPA fabrication methods limit efficiency, spectral resolution, filter response, and spectral bandwidth. Precision Photonics proposes to use its enhanced optical fabrication capabilities to build advanced VIPA protot ...

Identify and study candidate architectures for supporting and cooling massive (~5 Kg) arrays of transition edge sensors, achieving hold times for one week at temperatures below 100mK.

Optical Physics Company is proposing a three axis interferometer instrument which measures the one dimensional linear translation and the two-dimensional angular deflection in pitch and yaw of a 7 mm mirror 18-23 cm away. The design is simple and compact, fitting within a 5x5x7.5 cm volume. An initial lab demonstration has already been completed showing performance parameters better than NIST requ ...