Ocean Engineering 145 (2017) 263–267

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Ocean Engineering
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/oceaneng

Review

Indigenized Indian Drifting Buoys with INSAT Communication for

Ocean Observations
R. Srinivasan a, b, *, V. Rajendran a, Shijo Zacharia b, Tata Sudhakar b, M.A. Atmanand b
a
Vels University, Electronics & Communication Engineering Department, Pallavaram, Chennai, India
b
National Institute of Ocean Technology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India, Pallikaranai, Chennai, India

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Drifting buoys are widely deployed to measure near surface ocean currents and temperature. The Global Ocean
Drifting buoy Observation System program designed a global array of 1250 drifter buoys to cover oceans at resolution of one per
Embedded system 5
 5
grids spatially. The National Institute of Ocean Technology, India indigenized drifting buoy in 2012 with
SST geostationary satellite communication to have near real-time data at every hour. The drifting buoy technology is
Surface current applied for intellectual property right and transferred to Industries. The measurement scheme in the drifting
Atmospheric pressure
buoys is capable to measure variability in sea surface temperature and small mesoscale surface eddies. This article
Indian Ocean
describes case studies of indigenous drifting buoys in the Indian Ocean from 2012 onwards. The sea surface
INSAT
GPRS temperature and drifting speed measured with indigenous drifting buoy is compared with market available
drifting buoy (Marlin-Yug), moored data buoy (BD11) and remote sensed data. We also report results from a
drifting buoy with General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) telemetry in the coastal region.

1. Introduction onwards. The sea surface temperature and drifting speed measured with
indigenous drifting buoy is compared with market available drifting
Measurement and knowledge on Sea Surface Temperature (SST) is buoy (Marlin-Yug), moored data buoy (BD11) and remote sensed data.
important to understand atmospheric convection, amount of heat ex- We also report results from a drifting buoy with General Packet Radio
change between ocean and atmosphere, high productive ocean regions Service (GPRS) telemetry in the coastal region.
and climatic state. Ocean currents transfer heat from lower latitude to
higher latitude. Hence SST and ocean currents have significant impact on 2. Means and methods
world's climate. The Lagrangian drifting floats are widely deployed to
measure near surface ocean currents (Smith et al., 1984; Lanza, 1984). A 2.1. Drifting buoy description
significant development of drifting buoys for measuring SST and current
took place under surface velocity program (SVP) of the Tropical Ocean The DB is made of a flanged two part spherical float of 0.4 m diameter
Global Atmosphere (TOGA) experiment and the World Ocean Circulation made of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. The bottom half of the float
Experiment (Woce). The Global Ocean Observation System (GOOS) houses battery, embedded system, power control switch, power
program designed a global array of 1250 drifter buoys (DB) to cover controller and satellite modem or a General Packet Radio Service (GPRS)
oceans at resolution of one per 5
 5
(Ioc-goos; Soreide et al., 2001). In modem (Fig. 1). The bottom half of the sphere is coated with antifouling
general DB is powered with internal battery and communicates over paint. The upper half portion of the float is coated with ultra violet
short range radio frequency or through low orbit satellites. protective coating. A 12 m stainless steel tether wire is connected to an
The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), India indige- eye bolt at bottom center of the float. The bottom center of the float is
nized DB in 2012 (Srinivasan et al., 2013; Sudhakar et al., 2013; Zacharia strengthened internally. The bottom end of the tether is attached to a disc
et al., 2015). The DB technology is applied for intellectual property right type frame on windowed cylindrical holy sock drogue.
and transferred to Industries (Srinivasan et al., 2013). The industries are The battery (11–15 V, 56 Ah) is made of 32 alkaline cells. It is connected
produced the DB at a very competitive price. This paper describes case to the circuits through an external switch and power controller. The power
studies of indigenous drifting buoys in the Indian Ocean from 2012 controller is controlled by embedded controller and enables the power to

* Corresponding author. National Institute of Ocean Technology, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Pallikaranai, Chennai, 600100, India.
E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Srinivasan).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2017.08.054
Received 27 February 2017; Received in revised form 29 June 2017; Accepted 24 August 2017
Available online 21 September 2017
0029-8018/© 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
R. Srinivasan et al. Ocean Engineering 145 (2017) 263–267

Table 1
Specifications of drifter buoy sensors.

Sensor Barometric Sea water Temperature (
C) Depth (bar)

Pressure (m bar)

Measurement 800 to 1100 Sensor Range: 10 to 70 0 to 2

Range Calibrated Range: 25 to 35
Resolution 0.1 0.01 0.1
Accuracy ±0.3 ±0.05 1% of reading

Fig. 1. System Block diagram. Fig. 2. A photograph the drifting buoy.

the sub systems and sensors. The DB is instrumented with SST sensor at 2.7 km respectively. The Marlin-Yug drifting buoy mapped in a second
0.16 m depth, atmospheric pressure sensor and a GPS (Table 1). A strain similar eddy on 17–19 March 2013 with a major and minor axis of 2.6 km
gauge based load cell monitors the presence of drogue and it acts as the and 1 km respectively. The P2 drifting buoy is drifted to position 11.8716


drogue presence sensor (DPS). Six numbers of temperature and pressure N, 81.106
E on 20th March 2013 at 18:37:00 h, but Merlin-Yug drifting
sensor modules (T-String) are attached at 1–15 m depth on an underwater buoy arrived there only on 24th March 2013 at 15:03:42 h. The drifting
cable. The sensors are installed on the DB according to the application. A buoys followed a similar trajectory from the above position, except a
photograph the DB with T-String is shown in Fig. 2. The unique attempt north-south clockwise elliptical eddy with major axis 2.6 km and minor
with 96 temperature measurements and 24 GPS position acquisitions per axis 2.3 km made by P2 drifting buoy during 23–24 March 2013. In this
day enables the DB to measure fluctuations in SST and smaller surface section of Marlin-Yug drifting buoy followed trajectory of P2 within
eddies. The geostationary satellite communication (Indian Satellite 1–4 h. The maximum observed distance between the trajectories is
Telemetry) provides near real-time data at every hour. 73.7 km and the minimum is 0.4 km. Even though both the buoys are
drifted in a neighboring distinct trajectories with 1–4 h delay, they
2.2. Deployments intersected at location 14.16
N, 83.78 ºE on 4th April 2013 and at
location 13.51 ºN, 83.91 ºE on 6th April 2013. The drifting buoys had
The indigenous DB with satellite modem is deployed in the deep undergone a clockwise eastern-south semicircular trajectory of 146 km
Ocean for long duration (2–9 months) measurement and DB with GPRS diameter from 29th March 2013 to 12th April 2013.
modem is deployed for short duration (1–2 days) in the coastal regions. The scatter plot SST measured by P2 and Marlin-Yug drifting buoys
The deployment positions of the drifter buoys are shown in Table 2. from 28th March 2013 to 12th April 2013 is presented in Fig. 5. Their
trajectories are separated less than 25 km during this period. It is
3. Results and discussion observed that the measurements are strongly correlated with coefficient
of determination R2 value of 0.80.
The trajectories of the indigenous drifting buoys deployed from 2012 A scatter plot of current derived from drifting buoys position from
onwards are shown in Fig. 3. The field test results of P2 drifting buoy is 25th March 2013 to 12th April 2013 are shown in Fig. 6. A strong
validated with the data from a commercially available drifting buoy agreement of current measurements is seen with coefficient of determi-
(Marlin-Yug) deployed along with it, data from a nearby moored data nation R2 value of 0.88 when their separation is less than 40 km distance.
buoy (BD11, at the location Lat. 14.203 ºN, Lon. 82.93 ºE) and data from
Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite data. Table 2
Deployment positions of drifter buoys.

3.1. Comparison of SST and drifting speed measured by P2 and marlin-yug Drifting buoy name Lat. (
N) Lon (
E) Deployment duration

drifting buoys P1 (Sudhakar et al., 2013) 6.94 82.97 21 April to 19 June 2012
P2 (Zacharia et al., 2015) 11.0 82.51 09 March to 17 April 2013
CDB (Srinivasan et al., 2016) 17.01 73.24 21–23 February 2014
The trajectories of the P2 drifting buoy Marlin-Yug drifting buoy from
P4 13.14 83.5 01 May to 04 Nov 2015
9th March 2013 to 12th April 2013 are shown in Fig. 4 (Zacharia et al., P5 14.03 84.1 08 March to 12 May 2015
2015). Even though they are deployed in the same position and time, P6 8.699 83.6 02 October to 03
initially they followed dissimilar trajectories in the same direction. The November 2015
Marlin-Yug drifting buoy followed a clockwise north-south elliptical P25 (Srinivasan et al., ) 11.96 72.1 21 March to 01 May 2016
P30 11.92 74.0 25 June to 01 July 2016
eddy on 16–17 March 2013 with a major and minor axis of 4.2 km and

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Fig. 3. Trajectories of the indigenous drifting buoys deployed from 2012 onwards.

Fig. 5. The scatter plot SST measured by P2 and Marlin-Yug drifting buoys from 28th
March 2013 to 12th April 2013.

AVHRR over the region Lat. 10.5–14.5 ºN by Lon. 80.5–84.5 ºE, is

compared from 9 March 2013 to 12 April 2013 (Incois, 2016). The P2
Fig. 4. Trajectories of P2 and Marlin-Yug drifting buoys. and AVHRR measured a warming of ocean about 1.6
C during this
period. The direct comparison of daily mean of SST of P2 and AVHRR has
3.2. Comparison SST measured by P2 and BD 11 shown a good agreement with a coefficient of determination R2 value of
0.68. A scatter plot of the comparison is shown in Fig. 8. The difference
The moored data buoy BD11 is equipped with SST sensors at 1 m between the above measurements may be partly due to difference in
depth. The BD11 measures SST once in 3 h. Although P2 and BD11 are sensing depth and atmospheric effects (Wentz et al., 2000; Park et al.,
97–130 km apart, during 3–12 April 2013, their daily mean of SST 2011; Bhat et al., 2004).
measurements show very strong agreement in absolute and temporal
trend with a coefficient of determination R2 value of 0.93. The scatter
plots of average SST measured by P2 and BD11 are shown in Fig. 7. 3.4. Atmospheric pressure measurement

3.3. Comparison SST measured by P2 and AVHRR An atmospheric pressure sensor is interfaced to DB (P6) and deployed
at position Lat. 11.96 ºN, Lon. 72.1 ºE. on 21st March 2016. The atmo-
The daily average SST of P2 and remote sensed data measured by spheric pressured measured by the P25 drifting buoy is show in Fig. 9.

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Fig. 6. Scatter plot of current derived from P2 and Marlin-Yug drifting buoys positions
from 25th March 2013 to 12th April 2013.

Fig. 9. Atmospheric pressure measured by P6 drifting buoy.

Fig. 7. Scatter plots of average SST measured by P2 and BD11.

Fig. 10. Sea surface profile measured by P25 drifting buoy.

Fig. 8. Scatter plot of daily average SST measured by P2 drifting buoy and remote sensed
data from AVHRR.
from 21st March to 11th April 2016 is shown in Fig. 10. Profile strongly
represents the process of thermal inversion at mixed layer water depths.
3.5. Sea surface temperature profile measurement
3.6. Drifter buoy with GPRS telemetry
A DB (P25) is interfaced with temperature and pressure sensor
modules (TS1- TS6) at 0.5 m, 1 m, 2 m, 5 m, 10 m and 15 m depth. The A DB with GPRS telemetry is deployed at position Lat.17.03
sea surface temperature profile measured by DB (P25) in Arabian Sea ºN,Lon.73.23 ºE (about 3.5 km away from the coast) on 21–23rd February

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Acknowledgement

The authors are thankful to Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Gov-

ernment of India (Administrative Order ref:12 dated 19/10/2012) for
funding this work. We sincerely acknowledge the support of Ocean
Electronic Department, NIOT for deployment operations. The authors are
also thankful to INCOIS for providing AVHRR data service in Live Ac-
cess Server.

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