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Instrumentation for Open Ocean Aquaculture Monitoring

Document format: pdf

Publisher: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Creation date: October 2001

The University of New Hampshire (UNH) is working on an Open Ocean Aquaculture (OOA) demonstration program off Portsmouth, New Hampshire in the Gulf of Maine. This site has two fish cages moored with four anchor moorings each. To understand these systems and model their behavior, the forcing by currents and waves, and the response of the mooring (tensions) and the fish cage (motions) required measuring. UNH has an environmental mooring with an ADCP current profiler to obtain the current forcing. WHOI constructed a wave rider buoy, load cell and recorder systems and a fish cage motion package, and with UNH diver and ship support, deployed them at the OOA demonstration site. To measure the tension in the critical mooring lines of the fish cage, load cells were constructed and deployed with the mooring when it was serviced during August 2000. To record the load cell measurements of tensions, low power recording systems were constructed, tested and deployed on the load cell mounting bars by divers. Single load cells were deployed in the four anchor lines at the top of the rope where it attached to the grid line rings. In the NE corner, load cells were also placed in the two grid lines and the riser line to the fish cage. Finally at the fish cage, two load cells were mounted on the cage rim and attached to the NE corner upper bridle line. A single data system recorded the tensions at the NE corner, and the two load cells on the fish cage were designed to be recorded with the fish cage motion package. The recorders were deployed in 22 October 2000 and recorded good data through January, when they were turned around and redeployed. The three single load cell recorders were left in place until July 2001 and recorded through 23 June when their data storage filled.

Key Words: WHOI • NOAA • Open Ocean Aquaculture • Open Ocean Cage Culture