Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy testing during the Maritime Rapid Environmental Assessment 2003 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, in- cluding 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 in- corporates 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 con guration. Source/receiver geom- etry 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. Temper- ature pro les inverted from acoustic signals in two frequency bands on nearPRAXIS XXI; FCT - Atoms project PDCTM/P/MAR/15296/199