New Buoy Designs for Ocean Observatories

The Ocean Research Interactive Observatory Networks (ORION - www.orionprogram.org) is a federally funded program that focuses the science, technology, education and outreach of an emerging network of science driven ocean observing systems. The objective of this initiative is to provide the scientific community with ocean observatories around the globe that will provide the infrastructure necessary to collect, among other things, time series data of oceanographic and geophysical phenomena which can’t be collected from vessel expeditions alone. The program calls for placing buoys in all water depths and a full range of metocean domains, from calm equatorial sites to high latitude deepwater southern ocean locations. Conventional oceanographic buoys will not meet all the requirements of this program, so new buoy designs are being developed. The authors have developed a variation of the spar buoy design for the more robust requirements, and are currently looking into other options. This paper will review the more demanding criteria for the Orion buoys, and the proposed solutions for new buoy designs.