Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has announced a partnership with San Francisco-based ocean technology start-up, Saildrone, to improve measurement and monitoring in Australian waters and the Southern Ocean.
As part of the collaboration between Saildrone and CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere group, state-of-the-art unmanned ocean surface vehicles will be deployed, ‘Saildrones’, for the first time in Australian waters.
The Saildrones are solar and wind powered and can be at sea for up to a year at a time, assisting in science missions, such as stock assessments, uploading data from subsurface sensors or responding to marine emergencies.
They can be controlled remotely and incorporate both automatic identification systems (AIS) and ship avoidance systems to alert and avoid other ocean users.
With the Saildrones, CSIRO will collect more information about sea-surface temperature, salinity, and ocean carbon, and provide a platform for development of the next generation of marine and climate technologies.
CSIRO Research Group Leader Andreas Marouchos said: “Saildrones are long-range research platforms that can be sent to remote locations for an extended period of time, delivering real-time data back to scientists that was previously impossible to collect. The devices gather fundamental information about our oceans and climate using a powerhouse of ocean chemistry, meteorological and marine acoustic sensors.”
CSIRO will equip the vehicles with specialised sensors to measure ocean carbon, and will provide biomass estimates in the water column, added to the existing suite of marine and atmospheric sensors.
Australian Saildrone founder and CEO Richard Jenkins added: “Autonomy is a key technology for accessing the southern oceans, which are understudied due to the rough seas and the limited number of vessels that regularly pass through the region.”
