8. OPERATIONAL ASPECTS OF OCEANOGRAPHIC 



INSTRUMENTATION 



PART U. FOR THE HYDROGRAPHIC OFFICE (ENGINEERING) 



Gilbert Jaffe 



Hydrographic Office 

 Washington, D. C. 



The improvement of oceanographic instrumentation is an 

 engineering problem and so I will make a few remarks about some 

 of the engineering aspects. Our organization at the Hydrographic 

 Office has been the bridge between the survey instrument user -- 

 the survey scientist, if you will -- and Industry. It is from this 

 experience that my remarks will be drawn. 



The activity of our Instrumentation Division, the constant flow 

 of survey instruments in and out of our facilities over the past ten 

 years, has given us an objective, firsthand picture of sonne of the 

 shortconnings of our present-day oceanographic instrumentation. 



Essentially, what we have to work with now is divided into 

 three categories. 



Some instruments that are relatively off-the-shelf devices of 

 a rather ancient vintage are shown in figure 8. 8. This is a group 

 of WATER SAMPLERS, relatively simple mechanical bottles. 

 They do a very fine job, but, of course, they do not lend them- 

 selves to automatic machine processing of the data collected. 

 The most famous of these is the Ncinsen bottle on the extreme right. 

 Paired with the Nansen bottle are the traditional REVERSING 

 THERMOMETERS (fig. 8.9) which go back many, many years. 

 They ctre essentially mercury in glass thermometers and measure 

 the temperature of the sea in situ. The BATHYTHERMOGRAPH 

 {fig. 6.4), the reversing thermomieter , and the Nansen bottle have 

 collected the largest amounts of oceanographic data to date, and, 

 in fact, most of the data in the National Oceanographic Data Center 

 today, has been collected with one of these three instruments. 



The second group of instruments consists of commercially 

 available devices that have been put together in a single system, 



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