Leveraging Uncrewed Surface Vehicles to Support Global Ocean Data Collection

Summary: Acquisition of high-quality, global ocean, and meteorology data is key to understanding and characterizing the ocean environment to plan for and mitigate the impacts of climate change, improve success of conservation efforts, and promote sustained maritime security & economic prosperity for the Nation’s Blue Economy. Commercially available autonomous Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USV) provide an innovative, cost-efficient, and environmentally friendly method to achieve the ocean data collection requirements for realizing the five Decadal Vision goals and cross-cutting themes in Climate Change and Ocean S&T Infrastructure. Saildrone USVs combine wind-powered propulsion and solar-powered meteorological and oceanographic sensors that perform autonomous, long-range, in situ ocean data collection at scale, with a low carbon footprint. Saildrone USVs are proven capable for data collection across a diverse set of missions to include Ocean Data for supporting ocean and climate variables, fisheries and ecosystem monitoring, and Metocean data collection; Ocean Mapping for safety of navigation, nautical charting, offshore energy and cable installation, cultural heritage identification and monitoring, ocean exploration and physical oceanography; and Maritime Domain Awareness for law enforcement, maritime safety, and ecosystem monitoring. Saildrone seeks opportunities to grow its collaborations with Federal agencies to utilize long-endurance, low-impact USVs to expand on existing research efforts such as improving hurricane intensification forecasts, understanding the ocean-carbon circulation system, and supporting the National Ocean Mapping, Exploration, and Characterization Plan.

Sector: Industry
Organization: Saildrone, Inc.
POC: Brian Connon, brian.connon@saildrone.com
Other Contacts: Matt Womble, matt.womble@saildrone.com; Kitch Kennedy,
kitch.kennedy@saildrone.com