OOI successfully completes equipment test

The Ocean Observatories Initiatives (OOI) announces that it successfully completed a sea equipment test, which included a McLane Moored Profiler (MMP). Click here for video from the recovery cruise.  The OOI Team in September deployed three test moorings at two sites on the continental slope south of Cape Cod. That shelf break is at 39° 55.0’ N, 70° 47.5’ W. At that location, two moorings — a surface mooring and a moored profiler — were placed at approximately 1710 feet (520 meters) water depth. A third mooring was placed at a deep ocean location at 39° 30.0’ N, 70° 47.5’ W. That mooring was placed at 8136 feet (2480 m).

The equipment recovery cruise on the Research Vessel Knorr test took place April 10-15. All of the deployed equipment was successfully recovered and will continue to undergo post-deployment test and evaluation. The three moorings incorporate many of the design elements of the moorings to be used in the Coastal and Global Scale Nodes of the OOI and represent an important component of the program. The test deployment included engineering instrumentation to allow examination of mooring performance during the deployment, which spanned the winter of 2011-2012. For more information please see OOI's announcement.

The MMP is an autonomous time-series instrument that profiles the water column by traveling along a fixed wire carrying an array of sensors. An optional underwater inductive modem provides real-time communication between the MMP and a surface buoy or seabed node. Profiling depth, time intervals and pressure stops are user-defined, and profiling patterns can span specific seasons or timeframes.