Surfzone Water Properties Sensor (SWAN)

Our long-term goal is to develop a suite of compact, inexpensive in situ optical property sensors for use on autonomous platforms. As part of this long-term goal, our Phase I research efforts have focused on design, development, and testing of an inexpensive (nominally expendable) water property measurement system to provide environmental optical parameters in the surfzone that are critical for MCM operations. Work under this Phase I SBIR has been enabled by recent technological advances, including recent development of attenuation, scattering, and backscattering sensors for AUVs and other compact platforms. A SWAN (Surfzone Water Attenuation Node) will have a newly designed sensor (the BAM3) measuring multi-spectral attenuation, c, at 470, 532, and 660 nm, as well as GPS and RF communications. SWANs will be able to operate as drifters or as moored packages and will be capable of intelligent networking. A goal is to achieve a cost factor of $1K for the BAM3 and $2K for the SWAN.