For hydrographic surveys
in shallow inshore waters such as rivers, canals, lakes and ponds, access to
the site can sometimes be the biggest challenge of the survey. Driving a
boat trailer to the survey site requires a wide access point and a convenient
place to launch the boat, and the launch site may be miles from the actual
survey location. For very shallow water, there is the added problem of
ensuring the boat draft is enough to reach all of the survey area and obtain
the specified coverage.
To address these challenges, The Oceanscience
Group (San Diego) launched the Z-Boat 1800 portable remotely-operated survey
boat that brings high quality positioning and depth sounder instruments
together on a convenient remote platform that can be launched and operated from
practically anywhere. The Z-Boat 1800 represents the first in a new line of
remote survey systems to be released in 2012. The boat was revealed at the
January 2012 HYPACK conference in San Diego, followed by a trip to London for a
first outing in Europe at the Oceanology 2012 exhibition.
Early adopters of the Oceanscience system
include surveyors from Shafer, Kline & Warren, Lenexa, Kan. The
SKW team was faced with performing multiple cable route surveys in rivers with
little or no access for a manned boat. For the relatively short river
cross-sections, mobilizing a conventional survey boat was an expensive
proposition that would have made the job impossible to perform in a
cost-effective manner. Instead, the Z-Boat 1800 was deployed from the
shore between the fallen trees and logs. High quality survey data,
obtained using the Seafloor Systems SonarM8 single beam depth sounder and
Trimble R8 RTK GPS, were recorded on the shore without setting foot on the
water.
Oceanscience has been developing remote boats
for nearly a decade. According to Adrian McDonald, senior sales executive,
"the Z-Boat is the latest in a line of high performance instrumentation
boats. Previous Oceanscience remote boats were used almost exclusively for
current profiling and river discharge measurements; adding the capability to
perform high quality bathymetry was a natural progression for us and opens up a
significant number of opportunities for us to make surveyors lives
easier. Oceanscience's mission is to make our customers' data better or
easier to collect, but ideally both at the same time!"
To see the Z-Boat in action conducting a cable
survey in Ohio, watch the video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcu6ZGOPkjo
Oceanscience Launches Z-Boat for Shallow Water Hydrographic Surveys
April 30, 2012
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