EMOLT
type: Concept
in scheme: projects
definition: The eMOLT project (http://www.emolt.org/) is a non-profit collaboration of industry, science, and academics devoted to monitoring of the physical environment of the Gulf of Maine and the Southern New England shelf. In a series of phases funded by the Northeast Consortium (2000-2005), we have developed low-cost strategies to measure bottom temperature and salinity and, most recently, surface current velocity with the help of nearly 100 lobstermen dispersed along the entire New England coast. We hope to extend our existing multi-year time series (as well as our monitoring capabilities), continue integration with the Gulf of Maine Ocean Observing System (GoMOOS), and contribute to whatever operational system is developed for our region in the future. The eMOLT partners currently include all the major lobstermen associations in New England (Maine, Massachusetts, Downeast, and Atlantic Offshore), a NOAA scientist, the Gulf of Maine Lobster Foundation, and the Marine Science Department at the Southern Maine Community College. Having created this network of participating fishermen, our primary goal is to supply these individuals with the latest in low-cost instrumentation sufficient for maintaining continuous time series of physical variables at fixed locations and depths. Our database now consist of 1.3 million hourly records of temperature, 80k hourly records of salinity, and 40k satellite drifter fixes. While our mission is primarily motivated by lobster science and the need to document background conditions, we make our database accessible to the general public and the recently-formed GoM Ocean Data Partnership in the form of web served products and raw data (see www.emolt.org). In our quest to minimize instrumentation cost, we have partnered with engineers in the private sector to develop devices that may be of interest to the oceanographic community in general. The first is a GPS drifter at nearly a third the cost of conventional units that implements the SENS techno…

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type: Concept