Instrumentation used for limnology, the study of our world's lakes, is often developed for oceanography and then gradually crossed over as new technologies gain widespread acceptance in the ocean community. Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been widely deployed in naval operations, oil and gas surveys, and scientific studies with limited freshwater application. UBC-Gavia, a Gavia-class AUV owned and operated by the Environmental Fluid Mechanics group at the University of British Columbia, has been deployed as a monitoring and data collection platform for lake bottom and water column surveys alike. Untethered, AUVs are a powerful tool as they can often travel to regions that would be logistically difficult or otherwise impossible to access using more traditional surface based survey tools (e.g. towed sonar arrays, ROVs, profilers, etc.). These vehicles are well suited to polar exploration as they can be deployed from the ice surface with relatively low infrastructure cost and provide significant amounts of information on water bodies of which there tends to be a dearth of collected data. This is essential if mankind is to better understand and monitor the widespread impact that climate change is bringing to our Polar Regions. In the past two decades, several through-ice AUV surveys have been conducted; however, UBC-Gavia was the first AUV to be used in an under-ice limnological study. The three case studies presented here demonstrate UBC-Gavia as an important platform for exploring our freshwater environments with and without ice cover: (1) Loch Etive, Scotland; (2) Lake Ontario, Canada; and, (3) Pavilion Lake, Canada.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Research Division:	Engineering
Research Group:	Maritime Engineering
Research Field:	Maritime Engineering not elsewhere classified
Objective Division:	Environment
Objective Group:	Other Environment
Objective Field:	Environment not elsewhere classified
Author:	Forrest, AL (Dr Alexander Forrest)
ID Code:	82355
Year Published:	2009
Deposited By:	NC Maritime Engineering and Hydrodynamics
Deposited On:	2013-01-25
Last Modified:	2014-02-21
Downloads:	0