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Professional Tutorials

Professional Tutorials

 

A range of professional tutorials expand upon the major topical and technological issues of the day. 

The tutorials will be held on Monday, 18 June 2007 and are generally either half day or full day programmes. A half day tutorial costs £110 exc VAT and a full day tutorial costs £210 exc VAT.

 

Tutorial Timetable
 
Monday 18 June 2007 – Half Day, 0900 – 1200hrs
 
Wave and Tide Farming
Prof. Ian Bryden, Univ. of Edinburgh
 
Lander and Floater Design
Dr Phil Bagley, Univ. of Aberdeen
 
Marine Optics
Dr Alex Cunningham, Univ. of Strathclyde
 
Signal waveform design for underwater acoustic communications
Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis, Prof. Bayan Sharif, Newcastle University
 
Bottom-interacting shallow water acoustics
Prof William Carey and Prof Allan Pierce, Boston University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
 
Interferometric Swath Survey Design
Matt Geen BSc MinstP
 
 
Monday 18 June 2007 – Half Day, 1400 – 1700hrs
 
Satellite communications and location for ocean platforms
Dr David Meldrum, SAMS, Oban
 
Prop of EM waves through sea water
Prof. Jim Lucas, Univ. of Liverpool
 
Synthetic Aperture Sonar and target recognition
Professor Hugh Griffiths, DCMT Shrivenham, Cranfield University
 
An Introduction to Underwater Acoustics with Particular Reference to Environmental Impact Assessment
Professor Rodney Coates, Seiche Ltd, Anglesey
 
 
Monday 18 June 2007 – Full Day, 0900 – 1700hrs
 
Bayesian Signal Processing
Dr Jim Candy, Lawrence Livermore Lab
 

 

T1 Wave and Tide Farming

Prof. Ian Bryden, Univ. of Edinburgh

Even a superficial analysis suggests that the energy available from ocean waves and tidal currents can, in some circumstances, be prodigious. In this tutorial we will examine the prospects for harnessing this energy, what kind of technology will be required and what might be the realistic expectations for development across the world.

Simple mathematical models of marine energy systems will be developed and applied in the tutorial, initially to hypothetical "perfect" environments, and will then be developed further to allow the group to apply them to case studies representative of real locations.

Prof. Ian G Bryden presently holds the Chair of Renewable Energy at the University of Edinburgh and leads the Marine Energy and Coastal Defence research theme within the Institute for Energy Systems. His particular research interest is marine renewable energy. He received a PhD for his thesis relating to the dynamics of floating absorber wave energy systems from the University of Edinburgh in 1984. Since then his interests have been orientated more to research into the exploitation of tidal and marine currents, whilst maintaining, however, his interest in wave energy. Prior to taking his present position, he was leader of the sustainable energy research group at the Robert Gordon University, where he was Dean of Postgraduate Studies and now holds an honorary chair. He is a non executive director of the European Marine Energy Centre and the only academic representative on the Scottish Executive Forum for Renewable Energy Development in Scotland (FREDS). In 2001 he acted as specialist advisor to the House of Commons, Science and Technology Committee inquiry into wave and tidal current power. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute for Marine Engineers, Scientists and Technologists and the Institute of Physics.



T2: Half Day

Lander and Floater Design

Dr Phil Bagley, Univ. of Aberdeen

Landers are sub surface instrumentation packages ballasted and buoyed such that when they are deployed from a surface vessel they descend and land on the sea floor where they remain for the duration of an experiment (hours to years). During this period there is no need for the surface vessel to be on station near the Lander location. The surface vessel only needs to return to recover the Lander. Typically, Lander ballast is released under acoustic command from the surface vessel enabling the Lander to return to the surface for recovery and instrumentation data offload. Landers offer a cost effective method of transporting a marine experiment to the sea floor, requiring only limited use of ship time. Often specialised deployment equipment is not required, allowing the use of ships of opportunity


The tutorial is designed to assist people with little or no experience of Landers to allow them to assess whether this technology would be useful for their science.


Dr Phil Bagley has been designing, manufacturing, and operating Landers for over 17 years. He has worked in the north and south Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans. He has designed all the instrumentation for the University of Aberdeen, Oceanlab fleet of Landers (www.oceanlab.abdn.ac.uk) and is currently leading research and commercial projects in engineering for ocean science. He is a Chartered Engineer and member of the IET and SUT.


T4: Half Day

Marine Optics

Dr Alex Cunningham, Univ. of Strathclyde

The tutorial will cover the following topics:

  1. Fundamentals of marine optics: radiances and irradiances, inherent and apparent optical properties, the radiative transfer equation, computational modelling of underwater light fields and water-leaving radiances.

  2. Practical measurements in sea water: a description of the optical design of instruments used for measuring absorption, total scattering, beam attenuation, backscattering, fluorescence, radiance, irradiance and reflectance. Particular attention will be paid to the assumptions inherent in the design of these instruments, and to methods of calibration and deployment.

  3. Case studies: optics and photosynthesis in fjords, optical properties of a turbid estuary, remote sensing of phytoplankton and suspended sediments in the Irish Sea, interpretation of satellite radiometry over the Southern Ocean, linking spatial scales (from single cells to SeaWiFS images) in the optical characterisation of a coccolithophore bloom.


Alex Cunningham is a reader in the Physics Department at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow (Scotland), where he has led the Environmental Optics group since 1995. His main area of interest lies in the interpretation of optical signals in coastal waters and shelf seas. Optical signals can potentially provide information on physical factors (light availability and mixing) and dynamical processes (phytoplankton growth, dissolved organic carbon concentrations, sediment transport) with better spatial and temporal coverage than conventional methods of sample analysis. Moreover, active and passive optical sensors are suitable for deployment on a wide range of observing platforms from satellites to sea bed observatories. Alex has made extensive use of radiative transfer theory to solve problems of optical closure between in situ measurements of inherent optical properties and underwater light fields. He has carried out systematic investigations of the performance of satellite remote sensing algorithms in Case 2 waters, and the relationship between optical properties and physical processes in fjords. He has also been responsible for the development of novel optical instrumentation, including hyperspectral radiometers, nephelometers, fluorometers and flow cytometers. He led a team that developed a compact submersible flow cytometer for deployment in Autosub, an autonomous underwater vehicle. His peer-reviewed publications (over 50 in number) include 26 journal papers on marine optics. Alex has a degree in zoology from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Applied Physics from the University of Strathclyde. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics, for which he organises technical meetings on underwater optics, and member of the scientific steering committee for CASIX, the UK Centre for Air-Sea Interactions and Fluxes.



T5: Half Day

Signal waveform design for underwater acoustic communications

Dr Charalampos Tsimenidis, Mr Jeff Neasham, Prof. Bayan Sharif, Newcastle University

The tutorial will cover design of signalling waveforms that are suitable for utilisation in underwater acoustic (UA) modems.  These  will include PN sequences with low auto and cross-correlation properties, chirp design, in conjunction with pulse shaping and modulation schemes such as orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDM), direct sequence and multi-carrier code division multiple access (DS- and MC-CDMA). The tutorial will also address underwater channel modelling and simulation methodologies that are useful in evaluating "dry" performance of UA systems. Furthermore, the design of receiver algorithms will be considered that utilise adaptive receive arrays, carrier-phase and symbol timing recovery, Doppler compensation and multi-user detection methodologies. The tutorial is suitable for modem engineers with limited or no experience in this area to assist them in the design of UA based communication systems.


Charalampos Tsimenidis is a Lecturer in Communications in the School of Electrical, Electronic, and Computer Engineering. He received his PhD in 2002 from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. His main research interests are in the area adaptive array receivers for wireless communications including demodulation algorithms and protocol design for underwater acoustic channels. He has published over 40 conference and journal papers. During the last five year he has made contributions in the area of receiver design to several European funded research projects including LOTUS, SWAN, and ACME.

Bayan Sharif is Professor of Digital Communications and Head of the School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering. He received the bachelor and doctorate degrees from Queen’s University of Belfast and Ulster University, N. Ireland, in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He then held a Research Fellowship at Queen’s University of Belfast before he was appointed as Lecturer at Newcastle University in 1990, and then as Senior Lecturer and Professor in Digital Communications in 1999 and 2000, respectively. Prof. Sharif has research interests in digital communications with a focus on wireless receiver structures and optimisation of wireless networks. He has published over 200 journal and conference papers, and held UK and EU research grants in digital communications, underwater acoustics and signal processing worth over £3M. He is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the IET.



T6: Half Day

Bottom-interacting shallow water acoustics

Prof William Carey and Prof Allan Pierce, Boston

University and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

This tutorial is intended for engineers and scientists concerned with the assessment of long range acoustic communication and detection in shallow water. The bottom is typically a sandy sediment and has a dominant influence on the attenuation. We survey the basic science and experimental results that will enable one to make realistic interpretations and predictions. The tutorial consists of a primer on the fundamentals of shallow water acoustics, from the Pekeris waveguide, to modal solutions for realistic downward refracting sound velocity profiles, with a detailed examination of sample calculations for propagation in range-independent oceans. An assessment of representative effects of attenuation and a discussion of the importance of attenuation follws. Current physical models of ocean sediments are reviewed, beginning with the original phenomenological model (Biot 1956) and the later of Burridge and Keller theory. Applicable predictions of the theory, such as that the attenuation in the sediment varies as the square of the frequency at low frequencies. Finally, discussion of field measurements of sediment properties and of how these can be incorporated into propagation predictions is given.


Allan D. Pierce is Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Boston University and Adjunct Scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). He received his doctorate from MIT in 1962, and has subsequently held a variety of research and academic positions. Among his honors are the receipt of the Per Bruel Gold Medal from the ASME, the Rossing Prize in Acoustics Education from the ASA, the Silver Medal in Physical

Acoustics from the ASA, and, most recently, the ASA's Gold Medal. He is best known in underwater acoustics for his invention of the adiabatic mode theory, and to the acoustics community at large for his graduate-level text on acoustics. William M. Carey is a Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering at Boston University, an Adjunct Professor of Applied Mathematics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and an Adjunct Scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and has held various other appointments at, for example, the Directorate of the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, and the Naval Underwater Systems Center. He was the Editor of the Journal of Oceanic Engineering is currently an Associate Editor for Underwater Acoustics, the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Dr. Carey is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and a Fellow of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, He is the recipient of the IEEE-OES Distinguished Technical Achievement Award and the IEEE-OES Distinguished Service Award. He received the B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering, the M.S. degree in Physics, and the Ph.D. degree in Nuclear Science from The Catholic University of America.



T7: Half Day

Satellite communications and location for ocean platforms

Dr David Meldrum, SAMS, Oban

Increasing numbers of disposable autonomous platforms are being deployed in support of oceanographic and climate research and services – currently the Global Drifter and Argo programmes comprise nearly 4000 free-drifting buoys and floats. These are utterly reliant on successful satellite communications and location to deliver their data to the end user. In parallel, moored platforms and arrays are exploiting satellite technology to monitor station keeping and to ensure that data are collected even though the mooring might ultimately be lost to fishing activity or other misadventure.


A bewildering choice of systems is available, all of which promise to deliver exactly what the user requires. Making the correct decision requires a careful assessment of the needs of the user application in terms of throughput, timeliness, continuous availability, geographical coverage, energy consumption, cost, data management and reliability. This tutorial will explore the choices in some detail and the trade-offs between the various systems currently available. Practical demonstrations of a number of systems will be arranged, together with a number of real-world case studies.


David Meldrum studied physics and mathematics at St Andrews and Cambridge, subsequently becoming physicist in charge of the ice-penetrating radar programme at the Scott Polar Research Institute, and a physics tutor at Churchill College, Cambridge. He moved back to Scotland in 1978 to join the marine physics group at the Scottish Association for Marine Science at Dunstaffnage, and in 1989 became head of the technology development section, a position which he still holds. Two years were spent on secondment to CLS Argos in Toulouse, part of the French Space Agency (CNES), as technical co-ordinator of the IOC/WMO Data Buoy Co-operation Panel, a group of which he is now chair. Current research interests include satellite communication and positioning systems, autonomous seabed landers and data buoys, and the development of smart sensors and intelligent instruments. He is the author or co-author of more than 100 papers and reports in glaciology, oceanography, satellite communications and technology development. Within the UHI Marine Science degree programme, he has led the development of 3rd and 4th year honours modules in marine technology, complemented by honours projects in satellite communications and positioning systems.



T8: Half Day

Prop of EM waves through sea water

Prof. Jim Lucas, Univ. of Liverpool

The tutorial is concerned with the propagation of electromagnetic (EM) waves through seawater. The use of EM waves has several advantages over acoustic waves, which are the main technique presently used for data transmission through seawater. These advantages are faster velocity, longer wavelength and higher operating frequency. It has been shown theoretically and by experiments that EM waves within a frequency range 1 to 20MHz will be able to propagate distances up to 100’s/m by using dipole radiation for transmission powers of the order of 100W. These properties of the EM waves allows data to be propagated with high bit rates beyond 1Mbits/sec which allows video images to be propagated at standard camera frame rates (25Hz). A complete system has been designed and constructed. A series of EM wave propagation trials have been undertaken within both a laboratory tank and open water dock to quantify EM wave propagation through seawater.

The tutorial will include the following topics.

  • Theory using Maxwell’s and Debye’s Equations for the propagation through a conductive dipole medium

  • Antenna design and modelling in a conductive dipole medium using HFSS Packages

  • Realisation of an antenna suitable for EM wave propagation through seawater

  • Antenna testing in seawater

  • Marinised battery operated, stand alone power electronic systems

  • Laboratory test tank trials

  • Open water marina Trials

  • Communication electronic design and testing

  • Multiphase Monitoring of oil, gas and water within a pipeline

  • Applications



Prof. Jim Lucas is a Professor of Electronics in the department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics the University of Liverpool. He was born in Wigan, UK on the 21st November 1936. He obtained his degrees at Imperial College University of London. During the past forty years he has worked on gases electronics. Currently he is actively researching microwave-generated plasma for material processing, spraying and food technology.


T10: Half Day

Synthetic Aperture Sonar and target recognition

Professor Hugh Griffiths, DCMT Shrivenham, Cranfield University

Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) is a set of techniques by which it is possible to obtain high-resolution sonar imagery of a target scene from an underwater moving platform. The techniques owe much to the development of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and practical SAS systems on towed bodies and autonomous platforms are now being developed and demonstrated, producing imagery with resolution of order of a few centimetres, for applications such as detection of pipelines, wrecks and naval mines. The objective of this tutorial is to provide an introduction to the design of SAS systems and processing techniques, as well as the important issue of computer-aided detection and classification of targets in SAS imagery.


Tutorial Outline


  1. Principles of SAS

  • stripmap, squint and spotlight modes

  • sampling issues

  • motion compensation

  • interferometry


  1. Examples of systems and results

  • towfish and UAV-based


  1. Target recognition

  • template-based and feature-based approaches

  • multi-aspect imaging

  • knowledge-based approaches



Hugh Griffiths is Principal of DCMT Shrivenham (formerly the Royal Military College of Science), Cranfield University. He read Physics at Oxford University, graduating in 1975, then spent three years with Roke Manor Research before joining University College London, where he received the PhD degree in 1986 and the DSc(Eng) degree in 2000. He was appointed Professor at University College London in 1993, and served as Head of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering from 2001-2006. His research interests include radar and sonar systems and signal processing, in particular high resolution imaging and target recognition techniques. He has published over three hundred papers and technical articles in these fields. In 1996 he received the IEEE AESS Nathanson Award, and he has also received the IEE Maxwell and Mountbatten Premium Awards. He is a Fellow of the IET, Fellow of the IEEE, Fellow of the Institute of Acoustics, and in 1997 he was elected to Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He has served since 1996 on the Defence Scientific Advisory Council for the UK Ministry of Defence, and also on the Supervisory Board for the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Technology Centre in Electromagnetic Remote Sensing.


T12: Full Day

Bayesian Signal Processing

Dr Jim Candy, Lawrence Livermore Lab

In the real world, systems designed to extract signals from noisy measurements are plagued by errors evolving from constraints of the sensors employed, by random disturbances and noise and probably, most common, by the lack of precise knowledge of the underlying physical phenomenology generating the process in the first place. Methods capable of extracting the desired signal from hostile environments require approaches that capture all of the “a priori” information available and incorporate them into a processing scheme. This approach is typically model-based employing mathematical representations of the component processes involved. In this short course we develop the Bayesian approach to statistical signal processing in a tutorial fashion including the “next generation” of processors that have recently been enabled with the advent of high speed/high throughput computers. The course commences with an overview of Bayesian inference from batch to sequential processors. Once the evolving Bayesian paradigm is established, simulation-based methods using sampling theory and Monte Carlo realizations are discussed. Here the usual limitations of nonlinear approximations and non-Gaussian processes prevalent in classical nonlinear processing algorithms (e.g. Kalman filters) are no longer a restriction to perform Bayesian inference. Next, importance sampling methods are discussed and shown how they can be extended to sequential solutions. With this in mind, the concept of a particle filter, a discrete nonparametric representation of a probability distribution, is developed and it is also shown how it can be implemented using sequential importance sampling/resampling methods to perform statistical inferences yielding a suite of popular estimators such as the conditional expectation, maximum a-posteriori and median filters. Finally, a set of applications are discussed comparing the performance of the particle filter designs with classical implementations (Kalman filters). Participants will be introduced to a variety of statistical signal processing techniques coupled with applications to demonstrate their capability.


James V. Candy is the Chief Scientist for Engineering and former Director of the Center for Advanced Signal & Image Sciences at the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Dr. Candy received a commission in the USAF in 1967 and was a Systems Engineer/Test Director from 1967 to 1971. He has been a Researcher at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory since 1976 holding various positions including that of Project Engineer for Signal Processing and Thrust Area Leader for Signal and Control Engineering. Educationally, he received his B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Cincinnati and his M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville. He is a registered Control System Engineer in the state of California. He has been an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco State University, University of Santa Clara, and UC Berkeley, Extension teaching graduate courses in signal and image processing. He is an Adjunct Full-Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Candy is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and recently elected as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Clare Hall College). He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Phi Kappa Phi honorary societies. He was elected as a Distinguished Alumnus by the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Candy received the IEEE Distinguished Technical Achievement Award for the “development of model-based signal processing in ocean acoustics.” Dr. Candy was also recently selected as a IEEE Distinguished Lecturer for oceanic signal processing as well as presenting an IEEE tutorial on advanced signal processing available through their video website courses. He was recently nominated for the prestigious Edward Teller Fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He has published over 200 journal articles, book chapters, and technical reports as well as written three texts in signal processing, "Signal Processing: the Model-Based Approach," (McGraw-Hill, 1986) and "Signal Processing: the Modern Approach," (McGraw-Hill, 1988), “Model-Based Signal Processing,” (Wiley/IEEE Press, 2006). He has presented a variety of short courses and tutorials sponsored by the IEEE and ASA in Applied Signal Processing, Spectral Estimation, Advanced Digital Signal Processing, Applied Model-Based Signal Processing, Applied Acoustical Signal Processing and Model-Based Ocean Acoustic Signal Processing for IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society. He has also presented short courses in Applied Model-Based Signal Processing for the SPIE Optical Society. He is currently the IEEE Chair of the Technical Committee on "Sonar Signal and Image Processing" and was the Chair of the ASA Technical Committee on "Signal Processing in Acoustics" as well as being an Associate Editor for Signal Processing of ASA (on-line). His research interests include Bayesian estimation, identification, spatial estimation, signal and image processing, array signal processing, nonlinear signal processing, tomography, sonar/radar processing and biomedical applications.


 

T13: Half Day

An Introduction to Underwater Acoustics with Particular Reference to Environmental Impact Assessment

Prof Rodney Coates, Seiche Ltd., Anglesey

 

A brief but clear introduction to the physics of sound propagation in the ocean, the definition and use of appropriate quantities and units and an appreciation of the decibel notation will be provided. A formal approach to the engineering design of sonars will be presented. Particular attention will be given to natural and man-made underwater noise in the context of Environmental Impact Assessment. This is currently a vitally important topic bearing on legal and mitigation issues for a wide range of engineering activities in the ocean. The tutorial will comprise four lecture sessions and presentations will be computer based, with copious animations, video, sound files and filmed demonstrations wherever appropriate. Mathematical content will be kept to an absolute minimum. The objective is to explain briefly the physical principles underlying sound transmission in the ocean.
 
Tutorial Outline
 
Lecture 1: The role of density and elasticity of the medium in establishing two key quantities: sound speed and acoustic impedance, will be stressed. The significance of sound speed in establishing refraction and that of acoustic impedance in determining reflection at a boundary will be explained.
 
Lecture 2: The third key quantity of acoustic intensity will be introduced, its nature and its units will be explained. Enumeration by means of scientific notation and decibel scales will be explained. An appreciation of the relative loudness of typical sound sources, both natural and man-made, will be achieved by means of computer animations and sound samples.
 
Lecture 3: Structure of the sonar transmitter and receiver will be briefly described. Transmit transducers and receiver hydrophones will be introduced but not investigated in depth. The process of system Design will be outlined, introducing the delegate to the concept that any SONAR involves a presumption of target size and target reflectivity, at a particular range.
 
Lecture 4: In this final lecture, we shall focus on noise in the ocean environment. The delegate will become familiar with sounds and animated spectrograms of environmental phenomena, biological phenomena, and with manmade sounds in the ocean. These examples will provide the basis for a discussion of Environmental Impact Assessment including causes of physical damage and behavioural disturbance, touching briefly on legal and regulatory aspects and describing, where possible, appropriate measures for mitigation.
 
Prof. Rodney Coates retired from academic life at the University of Birmingham, where he was Professor and leader of the Underwater Acoustics Research Group some ten years ago. Since then he has run Seiche Ltd. as a retirement interest, specialising in consultancy and post-experience, postgraduate teaching in the area of Underwater Acoustics. Each September, Seiche has run a week-long course in this area, covering Basic Physics and Engineering, Advanced Civil and Military SONAR and also the Acoustic Monitoring of Marine Wildlife. Until 2005 this set of teaching modules was run at the Imperial College, London University. In 2006 Seiche transferred their activities to new premises at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, where they operate under the aegis of the Acoustics Division. In addition to this annual event, Seiche Ltd run courses at the request of organisations specifically desiring specialist in-house training. Clients for such courses have included ELAC-Nautic, Kiel; Thomson Marconi SONAR; Thales Underwater Systems, Cheadle Heath; United Arab Emirates Army R&D; ARMSCOR, STN Atlas, CSIR Pretoria, South African Navy, Westland Geo Projects, Sonardyne, ENTEC UK Ltd, BaESystems Ltd and the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Farnborough.

 

T14: Half Day

Interferometric Swath Survey Design

Dr. Matt Green BSc. MInstP 

 
Introduction
Interferometry has been available for many years as an alternative to beam-forming multibeam systems in swath bathymetry. However, many marine surveyors are not familiar with the attributes of interferometers, and are thus not well placed to design a survey to use such sensors to their best effect. This tutorial aims to rectify that problem, by introducing interferometric swath bathymetry, and showing how to design a survey to maximise results and minimise problems.
 
Following an introduction to the technique, and a (hopefully dispassionate!) comparison with multibeam and single-beam systems, a set of worked examples will be analysed. These examples will be selected to give a contrasting set of situations, and ideally will include inputs from requirements from within the tutorial group. The tutorial will be based around a mixture of PowerPoint presentation and live, onscreen, data processing with real survey data.
 
 
Topics

Topics to be analysed and discussed will include:

  •  Introduction to interferometric swath bathymetry
  • Comparison with multibeam and single-beam surveys
  •  Advantages, disadvantages, pitfalls and tips
  • Applications: market areas; hydrography, imaging, use of sidescan information
  • Expected rate of seabed coverage
  • Expected data quality: spatial resolution and depth accuracy
  • Methods of deploying the sensors and auxiliary equipment
  • Selection of auxiliary equipment: motion sensors, positioning systems and speed of sound sensors.
  • Extra information: tide, speed of sound profiles, etc.
  • On-line data quality assessment
  • Patch testing
  • Data processing
  • Data presentation
 
The Presenter
In 2007 Matt Geen will be celebrating his 20th year of involvement with interferometric swath bathymetry. In 1987 he joined the Bathymetrics team, when it spun off from the University of Bath to develop the first commercial interferometric seabed mapping system. When that organisation was re-formed as Submetrix, he led the engineering team, and subsequently joined Systems Engineering & Assessment Ltd (SEA), when SEA took over the Submetrix products, and re-engineered and relaunched them as “SWATHplus”. This time, he took a wider engineering role, including lead engineer of the Battlespace Access Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (BAUUV) programme, as well as retaining a hands-on engineering lead on SWATHplus development and support.
 
His main experience is in system and software design and development, survey support, customer support, and technology assessment for sensors and platforms.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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