Woods Hole Group provided a real-time oceanographic data acquisition system to monitor waves, tides, and currents in Little Bay, located on the northwest coast of the Caribbean island of Montserrat.  The data will be used to assist in the design and development of an expanded port facility for the Island.

The data acquisition system consists of a SeaPac 2100 wave, tide, and current meter deployed in 15 meters water depth approximately 1 km offshore.  The instrument is supported rigidly by a bottom-mounted aluminum frame secured to the seafloor.  An armored sea cable runs from the instrument to the beach, and terminates in a shore-based Base Station building used presently by Port officials.  The sea cable transfers data and power from the Base Station to the bottom-mounted instrument. The SeaPac 2100 is built with redundant internal power supplies and internal recording media to prevent data loss should the shore-based PC or connecting cable experience problems.  The Base Station consists of an Un-interruptable Power Supply (UPS), a shore box with AC/DC converter and data modems, and a PC running Windows NT.  Woods Hole Group provided specialized data acquisition software for the Base Station PC.  Data collected by the instrument are transferred to the Base Station PC, which logs the data to hard disk and displays ocean conditions in both graphical and tabular formats. 

Our engineers and technicians maintain the system to assure continuous data collection throughout the program.  Using standard telephone lines and modems, our engineers and technicians log onto the Base Station PC to view data plots, status files, and monitor the system operation.  Data are also downloaded directly from the instrument to our office PC through this link.

This link enables us to provide the client with weekly status reports, and to communicate directly with the instrument to set sampling parameters, access backup data, and perform system testing.

Using this system, we will provide the client with 13 months of wave, tide, and current data for Little Bay.  We will process the raw data and reformat the information into various time series graphs, including current speed and direction, tidal elevation, significant wave height, maximum wave height, peak wave period, and average wave direction, among others.  In addition, we will perform spectral analyses of the wave data to determine wave height and directional energy distributions, both for mean conditions as well as extreme conditions.  Harmonic decomposition of the tidal elevation and current velocity data will also be performed to separate the tidal processes from non-tidal processes within the region.  The processed data will provide the information required for calibration and verification of numerical models used to assist in port facility design.