Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy testing during the MREA’03 sea trial

This paper proposes an innovative concept that responds to the requirements of acoustic REA as the integration between a network of sophisticated Acoustic-Oceanographic Buoys (AOB) and online ocean properties inversion algorithms. A prototype of the system, including one sonobuoy and a preliminary version of the inversion code, was tested at sea during the MREA’03 sea trial. The AOB is a light acoustic receiving device that incorporates last generation technology for acquiring, storing and processing acoustic and non-acoustic signals received in various channels along a vertical line array. During the MREA’03 the AOB was deployed on a free drifting configuration. Source/receiver geometry was estimated from the buoy’s GPS. Online processing was made possible by wireless transfer of the data and inversion was done in a range-dependent environment. Temperature profiles inverted from acoustic signals in two frequency bands on near real-time are shown to approximately agree with concurrent CTD measurements.