RS Aqua Deliver ORCA Acoustic Recorders, RBR BPRs and SubCtech PowerPack Batteries to DIAS

Deep-water Observatories

RS Aqua are pleased to confirm that The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) have recently taken delivery of ten of our ORCA broadband acoustic recorders for use in the iMARL project. These recorders are fitted with multiple hydrophones for medium to ultra-low frequency detections. RS Aqua are also supplying five new RBRquartz³ BPRs (bottom pressure recorders) to the same project for storm and tsunami event monitoring. The BPRs, manufactured by RBR, have an exceptionally high resolution of 10ppb which equates to 70 micrometres whilst deployed up to 7,000m below the surface. To attain the long-term deployment requirements for these instruments, five new rechargeable Li-Ion deep-water PowerPacks from SubCtech in Germany were also supplied. These PowerPacks have class-leading energy density and excellent resilience to extreme environments, which made them the perfect choice for deep-water deployments.

RS Aqua worked to optimise these sensor systems so that the very highest-performance equipment was supplied to DIAS for the iMARL project. The result is a network of ocean observatories capable of producing exceptionally high quality data.

The iMARL Project

The Insitu Marine Laboratory for Geosystems Research (iMARL) project is a network of deep sea ocean sensors including ocean bottom seismographs (OBS), broadband ORCA acoustic recorders, and RBR BPRs for measuring absolute water pressure & temperature at the ocean floor. Strapped to deep sea landers, the iMARL network will allow for the detection of offshore earthquakes and offshore storms, as well as noise in the ocean and biologically generated acoustic signals.

Hitting the Ground Running

Within a week of the ORCA recorders being delivered, RS Aqua delivered an introductory training session in Dublin to get the researchers up and running. The recorders were shipped straight from the session to Galway where they were deployed 2 days later as a part of the Propagation of Acoustic Noise in Canyons (PANiC) project led by Eoghan Daly, a researcher at DIAS partners, NUI Galway.

 

All photo credits to Eoghan Daly, NUI Galway