Hydrographic Surveying GEOM 8195

Course offerings

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, the student will be able to:

• Describe the three main pieces of Canadian legislation that govern a large portion of hydrographic surveys conducted in Canadian waters.
• Demonstrate how Canada's offshore international boundaries are determined.
• Explain why a basic knowledge of oceanography and marine geosciences is necessary for the planning and conduct of hydrographic surveys.
• Recognize some key instrumentation used to collect oceanographic and marine geosciences physical samples and digital data.
• Relate the physical properties of water to the speed of sound in water and demonstrate how to calculate sound speed from measurements of temperature, pressure (depth), and salinity.
• Evaluate the various coordinate systems involved for the horizontal positioning for a hydrographic survey.
• Differentiate between the various vertical datums used in hydrographic operations and methods used to establish them.
• Explain the functions of marine positioning instrumentation used to determine system orientation and vessel heave.
• Illustrate the various sources of errors of horizontal positioning when conducting a hydrographic survey.
• Describe the principles of long, short and ultra-short baseline acoustic positioning system modes.
• Perform a water level datum transfer, for both tidal and non-tidal waters.
• Explain how acoustic system performance is affected by frequency, beamwidth, pulse-length, pulse repetition rate, detection threshold, bandwidth, and resolution.
• For single-beam echo-sounders:
• Explain the differences between narrow and wide beam transducers.
• Describe the various calibration methods.
• Explain the reductions needed to be made to measured depths due to water level variations, draft and transducer separation.
• Assess the uncertainty in soundings due to errors in the positioning system, echo-sounder, water level measurement, vessel motion and seabed topography and explain how to select appropriate methods for controlling or reducing sounding uncertainty for specific applications.
• For multi-beam echo-sounders:
• Explain the basic principles of multi-beam sonar transmit and receive beam forming and steering.
• Analyze and process a multibeam sensor calibration dataset, known as a Patch Test
• For side-scan sonar systems:
• Explain how side-scan sonar systems work.
• Interpret side-scan sonar records.

Effective as of Winter 2018

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