Invited Talk at the 2nd International Conference on Oceanography of the Bay of Bengal, Colombo, Sri Lanka (January 2018)

This talk presents the autonomous mobile marine meteorological system developed at Charles River Analytics called, Smart Weather Instruments (SWIMS). SWIMS samples the air-sea boundary layer and sends real-time data to remote stations on land. SWIMS consists of three steerable components to measure properties in air (up to 1km from the sea surface), on the sea surface and shallow underwater (upper layer of the sea). SWIMS is an autonomous mobile surface buoy and tethered blimp for atmospheric measurements. A novel wave generated jet propulsion system propels the SWIMS buoy system. An automated winch system inside the surface buoy will deploy the airborne meteorological sensor platform. SWIMS uses a Behavior based autonomy software architecture onboard the surface buoy platform. We will use re-chargeable batteries with the help of solar panels to power the system for a long period. SWIMS has the potential to act as a communication gateway connecting underwater instruments (data streams) to the remote control stations. SWIMS can operate for a couple of months at sea and transmit real-time geo-registered data to a remote location via a satellite communication link. The same link will be used by a remote control station to send high level commands such as, new mission plans to the SWIMS to change course, move to a new location, altitude or change the data sampling rates.