NSF Org:	OCE Division Of Ocean Sciences
Recipient:	UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
Initial Amendment Date:	September 16, 2012
Latest Amendment Date:	April 22, 2016
Award Number:	1234163
Award Instrument:	Standard Grant
Program Manager:	Barbara Ransom bransom@nsf.gov  (703)292-7792 OCE  Division Of Ocean Sciences GEO  Directorate for Geosciences
Start Date:	September 1, 2012
End Date:	August 31, 2016 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount:	$102,000.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date:	$102,000.00
Funds Obligated to Date:	FY 2012 = $102,000.00
History of Investigator:	Timothy McGinnis (Principal Investigator) tmcginnis@apl.washington.edu Darrell Jackson (Co-Principal Investigator) Christopher Jones (Co-Principal Investigator) Russell Light (Former Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office:	University of Washington 4333 BROOKLYN AVE NE SEATTLE WA  US  98195-1016 (206)543-4043
Sponsor Congressional District:	07
Primary Place of Performance:	Applied Physics Laboratory 1013 NE 40th Street Seattle WA  US  98105-6698
Primary Place of Performance Congressional District:	07
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI):	HD1WMN6945W6
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s):	Marine Geology and Geophysics
Primary Program Source:	01001213DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s):	0000, OTHR
Program Element Code(s):	162000
Award Agency Code:	4900
Fund Agency Code:	4900
Assistance Listing Number(s):	47.050

ABSTRACT

Due to the difficulty in working in the deep sea, especially around high-termperature hydrothermal vents that belch hot, corrosive, metal-rich fluids into ocean, novel instumentation needs to be developed and tested so important thermal and chemical fluxes associated with these systems can be determined. This research involves the testing, implementation, and data recovery from a unique acoustic sonar system (COVIS) that uses acoustic sonar and doppler phase shifts to make quantitative measurements of hydrothermal vent plume rise rates, volume fluxes, and plume shapes and distributions with time. Software will also be generated to enable processing of the resulting data and the extraction of heat fluxes, both in the plume emmanating from the hydrothermal vent and its rising thermal plume and from the diffuse flow of hot water along the seafloor around the vent. Field testing will occur at the Grotto hydrothermal vent cluster at the Endeavor vent field on the Juan de Fuca Ridge which is presently part of the Canadian mid-ocean ridge monitoring station. Resulting quantitative acoustic images of the plumes will be used to generate seafloor heat flux values that are fundamental to understanding the dynamics of hydrothermal venting. Three dimensional images of the hydrothermal plumes coming from the Grotto vents will also be generated. Project goals include determining linkages between time-varying flow measurements on the seafloor and fluxes higher in the water column. Broader impacts of the work include building infrastructure for oceanographic science in terms of developing hardware and software that will complement and potentially be implemented on NSF's newly installed Ocean Observing System infrastructure at the vent fields at Axial Volcano on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, which is slated to be instrumented in 2013. Additional impacts include international collaboration with Canadian scientists, support of an institution in an EPSCoR state (New Jersey), support of two PIs from groups under-represented in the sciences, training of graduate and undergraduate students, and public outreach through the NEPTUNE Canada and NOAA outreach engines.

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

COVIS was deployed in Sept 2010 and recovered in Sept 2015.  The system operated for approximately 1 month in 2010 (primary to secondary node cable failure) then has been in continuous operation from 9/2011 to 9/2015.  During that time, COVIS operated with little to no degradation in sonar performance and amassed an acoustic database of approximately 30Tb of plume, Doppler and diffuse acoustic backscatter data of hydrothermal flow of the Grotto vent in the Main Endeavour Vent Field (MEF).  Theoretical work has been performed on the analysis of this data to derive heat flux from the acoustic data (Jackson, Xu).  COVIS holds the record for a continuously operating instrument on the Neptune Canada system including all other custom and commercial systems.   All COVIS data (sonar and engineering metadata) is stored/archived and processed by the Neptune Canada Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS) at http://dmas.uvic.ca/home.  The historical data and near real time data is available through the DMAS web interface - Oceans 2.0.  Raw data products include the files for plume imaging, diffuse flow, and Doppler scans in tar file format.  Processed data products include plume imaging, diffuse flow and plume Doppler data in the following formats: pdf, matlab and png.

Last Modified: 11/16/2016
Modified by: Timothy M Mcginnis

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