Ships of opportunity and ferries as instrument carriers
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Introduction
Operational monitoring of coastal areas and shelf seas is mainly carried out by manual sampling and analysis during ship cruises. In addition, automatic operating measuring systems on buoys allow routine measurement of standard oceanographic parameters (temperature, salinity, currents) and in some cases other parameters, e.g., turbidity, oxygen and chlorophyll fluorescence. These systems are much affected by biofouling and the maintenance/operation costs are quite high mainly due to ship costs.
Based on all these problems and limitations, it seems logical to investigate which role ships of opportunity could play (Fleming et al. 2002). There are many routes for ferryboats and "ships-of-opportunity" which run quite frequently. Already 60 years ago the "Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR)" [Reid et al. 1998] followed the idea of using scientific equipment on such ships for continuous recording of environmental data. This method is now improved and shows an impressive data set of semi-quantitative phytoplankton data over the world oceans.
Applying such measuring systems on ferry boats or ships-of-opportunity has several advantages:
- the system is protected against harsh environment, e.g. waves & currents,
- bio-fouling can be more easily prevented (inline sensors),
- no energy restrictions (in contrast to buoys),
- easier maintenance when ferry comes back "to our doorstep"
- lower running costs since the operation costs of the ship do not need to be calculated
- instead of point measurements (buoys) transects yield much more information.
Technical Description:
The FerryBox on board of a ship of opportunity consists of a water loop that gets its water from the outside, a data management system for control, data acquisition and storage and a telemetry unit for transmitting the data to shore.
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Please note that others may also have edited the contents of this article.
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Please note that others may also have edited the contents of this article.
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