A BRIEF SURVEY OF MILITARY OCEANOGRAPHY 

 AT THE NATO SACLANT ASW RESEARCH CENTRE 



Dr. Melbourne Briscoe 



NATO SACLANT ASW Research Centre 



La Spezia, Italy 



The NATO SACLANT ASW Research Centre is located in 

 La Spezia, Italy, on the coast of the Mediterranean about 

 120 km south of Genova. The staff is international, 

 there now being scientists from 13 of the 15 NATO 

 countries, totalling about 50 scientists with about 150 

 support personnel; this does not include the crew of our 

 research vessel the MARIA PAOLINA G. , a converted 2000 

 gross ton merchant ship. There are normally nine U.S. 

 scientists attached to SACLANTCEN, the quota being 

 established by the U.S.; they are distributed throughout 

 the working groups of Oceanography, Sound Propagation, 

 Target Classification, Operations Research, and 

 Theoretical Studies. We all live and work in relative 

 harmony, enthusiasm, and co-operation, especially 

 considering the two languages of Italian and English 

 that are normally used, plus the German, French, and 

 especially American that seems to get everyone so 

 confused! 



Our assignment is to provide scientific assistance to the ASW 

 efforts of the NATO countries. It is sometimes difficult to find an 

 appropriate operating slot in the middle of the multiple -overlapping 

 of the programs of the various countries, but this has been our goal. 

 This paper is not a report on all the work of the Centre*, nor even 

 on all the work of the Oceanography Group, but an attempt to tell 

 you what we have done and what we are thinking of doing in the con- 

 text of multiship, military oceanography. We call cruises to this 

 end MILOC surveys. 



In 1964 we planned and participated in a cruise 

 involving several ships and airplanes between ocean 

 stations KILO and JULIET in the eastern Atlantic just 

 west of Ireland. The bathythermograph data from the 

 cruise and much of the BT data on our later cruises have 

 been subjected LRef. 3] to what we call a three- line 

 analysis [Fig. l]. This simply means that the BT trace 



More complete information is available in References 

 1 and 2. 



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