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Articles

1999: Vol. LXXVI, No. 1

Towards Adequate Multibeam Echosounders for Hydrography

Submitted
April 25, 2018
Published
2018-03-14

Abstract

As IHO’s new standards for hydrographic surveys are adopted by the Hydrographic Offices, a logical next step will be, given the order of a survey, to optimize the data acquisition. A very important parameter in this context is the design and capability of the multibeam echosounder and the enclosed software which extracts information from the pings during the survey. This article points out the advantage of homogeneous sea bed coverage, gives an example of useful information which is present in the swath, but not available to the surveyor today, and demonstrates how a perturbation of the sound velocity profile affects the depths measured by a multibeam echosounder, thereby opening up for the feasibility of designing on-the-spot warnings to alert the surveyor against excessive fluctuations in the velocity of sound during the survey. A spin-off of this analysis is explicit expressions for the contribution, from errors in the velocity of sound, to the error budget for multibeam surveys.