The University of Southern Mississippi’s state-of-the-art Viking buoy — operated as part of USM’s offshore 4-D CUBEnet initiative — is back and sending data. This advanced platform, manufactured by the Canadian company MTE Instruments, is one of several innovative platforms monitoring meteorological and oceanographic sea-state conditions in real time, transmitting data every 15 minutes to a shore-based server.

The data collected by the Viking buoy undergo quality control and are made publicly available through GCOOS here. Then the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) data servers ingest the data and distribute it as well.
In addition to monitoring sea state conditions, the buoy serves as a versatile offshore platform for deploying a CTD (Conductivity, Temperature, Depth) instrument connected to an autonomous profiling winch, which enables the collection of high-resolution water column profiles, addressing a critical gap in data acquisition for autonomous vehicle operations.

High-resolution time series data on temperature, salinity, and pressure over the entire water column at a fixed position are challenging to obtain, even with advanced autonomous platforms like autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs). These platforms excel in non-stationary data collection but face power limitations. The Viking buoy’s autonomous winch and CTD system overcome these challenges, offering a novel approach to acquiring stationary, high-resolution data crucial for understanding water column dynamics.
The buoy is equipped with additional cutting-edge instruments to enhance data collection:
- A Teledyne RD Instruments Sentinel V-100 Real-Time ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) measures current speed and direction in 1-meter depth bins, from its position 1.5 meters below the surface to the seafloor at 21 meters depth.
- For meteorological observations, a Vaisala Weather Station WXT536 and a Wind Sensor WMT700 provide data on air pressure, temperature, humidity, rainfall and wind speed and direction, recorded at 30-minute intervals.
- Wave data-including wave height, peak wave height, and peak period-are averaged and stored every 30 minutes.
The integration of a standard profiling CTD with an autonomous winch on an ocean discus buoy represents a significant technological advancement. The approach provides high-resolution, time-series data on water column properties, which are critical for validating and optimizing operational littoral autonomous vehicle operations and oceanographic models.
The Viking buoy’s innovative design and its role in the 4-D CUBEnet underscore the importance of accurate, real-time knowledge of water column structures for advancing ocean science and technology.
