Project FLOSSIE: Marine Data Stewardship at the Waterline
Abstract:
To support its mission of long-term understanding of coastal waves and wave models, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Coastal Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL) sponsored the FLOSSIE Project to gage the effects of technology changes on the long-term wave measurements from NOMAD hulls. On behalf of CHL, NDBC engineering and operations integrated old, new, and leading edge technologies on one NOMAD hull. The hull was successfully deployed in July 2015 at the Wave Evaluation and Testing area off of Monterey Bay, CA. The area hosts an NDBC 3-m hull with cross-generational-technologies and a reference standard in a Datawell Waverider buoy. Thus cross-generational and cross-platform inter-comparisons can be performed simultaneously to an accepted standard. The analysis goes beyond the bulk wave parameters. The analysis will examine the energy and directional distributions over the frequency range of wind-generated waves.
The project is named in honor of the pioneering World War II Naval meteorologist, Commander Florence (Flossie) Van Straten (1913 – 1992), USNR, who coined the acronym for NOMAD.
This paper will discuss the goals of the project, present preliminary data results and application to the long-term measurements, and outline the plans incorporating Best Practices of Marine Data Stewardship for the resulting datasets.