Jaffe Laboratory for Underwater Imaging

Holiday Greetings from the Jaffe Lab

Last friday we successfully deployed our tow platform for our new laser imaging system. The sled performance was very good and we were able to tow it reliably very close to the bottom with great altitude-keeping performance. In the video below, there is a nice example of strong changes in water color and clarity as the sled decends from the surface down to 50 m. Towards the end of the video note the high abudance of jellies zipping by the sled as it moves through the water at 3.5 knots.

The journal article "Measurement system for marine animal reflectance functions" by Justin M. Haag, Jules S. Jaffe, and Alison M. Sweeney has been recently published in Optics Express. This paper presents details of the optical instrument design and calibration for a new version of the OSMAR (optical scatterometer for measurement of angular reflectance) system that was described last year. Also included, are scattering patterns for squid and fish species that show interesting similarities in light scatter from two otherwise quite different animals. The physical explanations and potential ecological implications of the observed scattering from these species, as well as from others not yet presented, is a subject of future work.

On Monday we completed our first successful test with multiple, free-drifting Mini-AUEs. This is a major milestone for the project as it marks the first time that the vehicles have been deployed and recovered in the field un-tethered. It is also the first time that multiple units have been deployed together. We released two units programmed to hold roughly a 6m depth while drifting for one hour off Torrey Pines Beach. We did three consecutive 1-hour deployments and all of the critical functions of the vehicles worked perfectly every time. Below are a few photos from the deployment and a example of preliminary data.

TwoUnitsUnderWater

TwoUnitsUnderWater