Subscribe to ShellEye bulletin service Feedback survey Register your interest

Deploy the buoys

23 October 2015
On Wednesday 7th October 2015 the ShellEye team members from the University of Exeter successfully deployed a mooring close to one of the project partners’ shellfish farm. Dr Wiebke Schmidt (ShellEye scientist from the University of Exeter) summarises the deployment mission...

The mooring will be used to study the temperature, salinity and oxygen levels within the area of the shellfish farm. The mooring consists of two parts; a large 100-litre float attached to a chain and anchored to the sea floor (grey float in the photo) and a smaller buoy, tethered to the large float with several instruments suspended from this smaller buoy (orange in the photo).

Before deployment, the sensors were calibrated in the laboratory and set up to observe the status of the seawater at 10-minute intervals. The team is planning to maintain the buoy for the next year and offload the data from the sensors each month. These measurements will help the team understand how the conditions within the farm change with each season and how these changes relate to the water quality.