Instead of digitizing existing nautical charts, the team incorporated detailed data from water-depth sounding instruments aboard research ships and mathematical models to interpolate three-dimensional geographic data points on the seafloor. Multibeam bathymetric survey techniques provide a rapid means of determining the morphology and nature of the seafloor. The recent Hydrosweep DS-2 System onboard RV Polarstern provides 59 individual soundings of the water depth and echo strength for each ping.
“We were ultimately able to work with a data set comprising some 4.2 billion individual values,” says Jan Erik Arndt, the editor of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean and AWI expert.
Their resulting chart offers 500-square-meter resolution of the waters south of 60 degrees south latitude, which demarcates the northern extent of the Southern Ocean.
This Bridge Navigation Watch Alarm System (BNWAS) in simple terms is a timer alarm system that forces watch officers to reset this system in periodic time intervals to insure that they are fully alerted (not sleeping, playing solitaire with bridge computer,etc).
Posted by: msatapathy | April 17, 2013 at 03:38 AM