Autonomous Transient Ocean Event Monitoring (ATOEM)

Abstract

A novel conceptual design is presented for a research platform for Autonomous Transient Ocean Event Monitoring (ATOEM). In simplest form, ATOEM would be an autonomous diesel-electric submarine of conventional design, but stripped of all of its requirements for human occupation and life support, and whose “torpedo” tubes would instead be loaded with a variety of AUV configurations (e.g., benthic, photic zone and midwater) capable of autonomous docking with the “mother ship”. Global deployment of a large fleet of modular, low-cost, highly-manufacturable ATOEM platforms has the potential to transform oceanographic research by providing coordinated, comprehensive, time-series, spatiotemporal measurements of all key ocean properties on an unprecedented scale.