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An upward-looking sonar instrument, the Ice Profiling Sonar
(IPS), has been developed, and successfully used for obtaining
time series measurements of ice keel depths over the continental
shelves of the Arctic in support of scientific research. The IPS
instrument capabilities have since been expanded to provide
accurate measurement of ocean waves. This new instrument, the
WaveSonar, uses a high frequency acoustic transducer (420 kHz),
with a very narrow conical beam (2? width at -3 dB) to minimize
the spatial smoothing of surface waves across the sonar
footprint. With low power consumption, and large storage
capacity (64 Mbytes flash EPROM), the instrument is capable of
continuous measurements of wave amplitude at a sampling rate of
1 Hz over deployments of up to nine months. The WaveSonar has
the advantage of operating from the relative safety of the ocean
floor, thereby avoiding surface hazards such as ships, vandalism
and adverse weather.
[Summary provided by ASL Environmental Sciences]
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