A new monitoring station has been installed in the shipping channel leading to Port Everglades. It is a collaboration between the
Florida Area Coastal Environment (FACE) program and the Coral Reef Early Warning System (CREWS) technology developed by the
Coral Health and Monitoring Program (CHAMP). Both programs operate out of NOAA's
Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML).
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| Showing an overview of all operations: the dive boat, the channel marker, the running of cables, the trench that was dug, the hard plastic tube that would be buried in the trench, and the sandbags that would be used to weight down the cables at the channel's bottom. |
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| The electronics technicians at work. |
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| The weatherproof box with the station's datalogger, satellite transmitter, and extensive battery backups. |
The station includes meteorological sensors (wind, air pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation) and controlling electronics in a package installed on land, on property controlled by the US Navy. These electronics are powered by a land-based power feed (essentially everything is just plugged into an electrical outlet) but incorporate a series of four rechargeable batteries capable of running the systems for more than a week even in the absence of the external power feed. The land-based portion of the station is connected by cabling to two underwater instruments installed directly on the nearby USCG channel marker #7, an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) and a Conductivity/Temperature sensor (CT). Salinity measurements are calculated from the conductivities and temperatures reported by the CT.
All instruments save the ADCP will report in near-real time. The ADCP will log its measurements internally and its data will be downloaded manually on a roughly monthly basis.
Current data are available online (
http://www.coral.noaa.gov/static/data_pvgf1_Web_12.html) and will soon be fed automatically to NOAA's National Data Buoy Center (NDBC).