Ref.: International Workshop on Marine Technology, Barcelona, November 2007
Abstract: The Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy (AOB) is an underwater acoustic data aquisition system, which uses a surface buoy and an underwater array of acoustic and non-acoustic sensors. The surface buoy includes a digital storage unit for the acquired data, a communications system for remote monitoring and data transmission, a digital processing unit for pre-processing of acquired data and a battery power supply. The AOB was developed under the AOB Joint Research Project, which was proposed in a consortium of several institutions, aiming at the development and validation of acoustic-oceanographic remote sensing systems and data inversion-integration methods for the reliable, rapid environmental assessment (REA) of shallow water areas. So far, the AOB was deployed in several sea trials such as Maritime REA '03 (Mediterranean) and '04 (Atlantic), MakaiEx'05 (Pacific), and BluePlanet'07 (Mediterranean). The data collected at sea shows that the AOB is a versatile, robust and easy to use tool for a variety of broadband underwater acoustic applications.