Moored equipment
NMF maintains a large pool of equipment that can be deployed on moorings for periods of up to two years and water depths of up to 5000m. All moorings are custom designed and are held on the sea floor using a weight, connected to the mooring via 2 acoustic releases. A mooring is built up using mooring cable and floats and has a beacon on top. Instruments can be connected to the cable at the depth of interest. The following mooring instrumentation is available in the NMF pool. Requests to utilise equipment can be addressed to: Zeynep Erdem (Zeynep.erdem@nioz.nl).
Sediment traps
Sediment traps are used to collect time series of biological or other suspended particles that are transported from the surface to the deep ocean. A sediment trap is equipped with a rotor with 24 or more sampling bottles.
Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP)
ADCP's are used to measure particle load in the water column. The pole-mounted CT/ADCP-system is developed to measure parameters as temperature, salinity and optical backscatter of the seasurface and currents down to 30 meters during the cruises with the NIOZ ships RV Navicula and RV Stern.
Specifications:
A downward pointing pole can be mounted beside the ship. This pole has a wing-profile for drag-reduction. Attached to this pole are a Teledyne RDI “Rio Grande” ADCP, a pumped CT-set (consisting of a SBE3plus, a SBE4 and a SBE5P) and a Seapoint OBS. The CT-set and the OBS are powered and logged using a SBE31 MultiChannelCounter and a computer with Seasave for Windows.
Current meters
Current meters are used to measure ocean currents at depth.
Moored CTD’s
With moored CTD's we measure conductivity, temperature and depth.
Moored profiler
The moored profiler is an instrument that travels along the mooring line to measure depth profiles in the water column. The basic instruments it carries are a CTD for temperature and salinity and an ACM (acousting current meter) to measure currents, but other instruments can be added, including bio-optical and chemical sensors. The profiler uses a battery-powered traction motor to climb up and down the mooring. Its sensors document water and current properties as the profiler climbs or descends.
Benthic Glass Spheres
Provide buoyancy to moorings and landers.
Specifications:
Outside diameter: 17” (43,2 cm)
Buoyancy: 25,4 kg
Depth rating: 6.700 m
Weight in air: 17,7 kg
Hard hats available: standard (for landers) or ribbed (for moorings).
Availability: appr 300 x
Syntactic Foam
Provide buoyancy to moorings and landers.
Specifications:
Eliptical (buoyancy/depth rating/#)
170 kg/4000 m/1
365 kg/3000 m/in line 2
365 kg/3000 m/ADCP 2
200 kg/1500 m/in line 6
300 kg/1500 m/in line 5
400 kg/1500 m/in line 1
400 kg/1500 m/ADCP+ CML 8
500 kg/1500 m/in line 2
500 kg/1500 m/ + CML 2
500 kg/1500 m/+ ADCP+CML 9
