Unmanned Underwater Vehicles Deep Ocean Operations U.S. Navy System Design Custom Scientific Instrumentation Design Field Experiments Marine Corrosion Analysis and Control

Graduate student Dan Hayes prepares an under-ice AUV for deployment in the Arctic. Department engineers have decades of experience supporting research missions at sea, in coastal environments, and on arctic ice. Several autonomous underwater vehicles have been designed for arctic operation. The temperature and conductivity data gathered during their excursions under the ice are used to derive vertical heat flux—a component of the system used to model arctic climate. Deploying an AUV Paul Aguilar, wearing a special dry suit to withstand 28°F waters, went under the ice to locate and attach a retrieval line to the mooring. Department engineers are involved in the North Pole Environmental Observatory missions led by scientists from the APL-UW Polar Science Center. In April 2002 divers Paul Aguilar, Mike Ohmart, and Eric Boget aided in the recovery of a 4120-m-long mooring of oceanographic recording instruments that had been anchored for one year to the Arctic Ocean floor at the North Pole. To support shallow water and under-ice field experiments, the Department has four scientific divers certified by the American Academy of Underwater Sciences and by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration for nitrox mixed gas diving. To explore acoustic penetration in ocean sediments, Department engineers designed and deployed benthic acoustic measurement systems during SAX99. APL-UW divers inserted hydrophones in a burried array from a cofferdam to avoid disturbing the sediment surface during SAX99 experiments.