Advancements in Commercial Sensor Packages for Underwater Gliders Available to Purchase

Conventional monitoring of the oceans using ships is a labor intensive and costly exercise that yields low resolution temporal and spatial record of the ocean environment. However, over the last decade underwater gliders, propeller-less AUVs that glide through the water by changing their buoyancy, have become mainstream collectors of oceanographic data and are replacing ships as the main means of data collection in some locales. Early gliders were designed to carry a very limited science sensor payload, a CT (conductivity and temperature) or CTD (conductivity, temperature and depth) system. However, as glider popularity has grown over the last 8-10 years so has the demand to increase the diversity and number of sensors that can be carried by these vehicles. The initial selection of small size, relatively low power, greater than 1000 m rated sensors was limited. However, sensor vendors have begun working on next generation sensor packages for some of the systems whose original power, size and weight footprint was too large for an underwater glider. In this paper we will discuss three sensor packages that have been redesigned and can now be integrated into gliders.