Researchers:
Drs. William Savidge, Richard Jahnke, James Nelson, Dana Savidge, all SkIO; Dr. Ann Gargett, ODU; Dr. George Voulgaris, U South Carolina; Dr. Tim Short, USF
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 The BOTTOMS-UP observatory is designed to capture events occurring across a range of spatial and temporal scales. At the largest scale, permanently installed physical oceanographic instrumentation measures the regional scale forcing in the water column ( left image). WERA HF radar data from SABSOON is used to document surface currents across the entire shelf directional wave field within a more delimited sector, including the area around SABSOON tower R2. Existing instrumentation includes meteorological packages, ADCPs, surface and bottom CTDs, fluorometers and PAR sensors. Recently installed tilted-head digital rotating sonar scans a circular area up to 5 m in diameter to provide information on spatial variability in bed morphology. Near-realtime sonar images are now available.
A Teledyne/RDI 600kHz 5 beam ADCP (VADCP) was installed near tower R2, in 26m of water. The VADCP team includes D. Savidge, A. Gargett (PIs), J. Amft, T. Moore and C. Smith. The unit has been operating at 1Hz since May 31, 2007. Resulting data have undergone first-pass QA assessment (time interval check, gap fill, outlier removal) and are filtered with a 9 sec Butterworth filter.
The observatory instrumentation is used to characterize the seabed response to physical forces acting across a spectrum of time scales. The frequency, intensity, and timing of energetic events are detected within the water column, and their manifestation within the BBL followed. BBL instrumentation measures thresholds of bed motion and characterizes near-bed suspended loads, and will be used to estimate pressure fields and advective fluxes at the interface. In situ geochemical sensors will be used to characterize rates of advection of properties within the sediment and connect those properties to both physical forcing above the interface and biological forcing driven by seasonal and diurnal cues. The combination of instrumentation and observational strategies will produce a holistic portrait of the causes and consequences of benthic exchange processes in permeable sediments.
This research project was awarded to SkIO by NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences and Directorate for Geosciences.
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