Presentation Description: The U.S. Department of Energy has designed and fabricated a new open-source buoy platform, called the instrumentation test buoy. The new buoy has the same instruments as the existing lidar buoy fleet but with expanded capabilities and flexibility to integrate new instruments for testing. The mission of the new buoy will be to evaluate the performance of new offshore sensors in the field. The test buoy would serve as an offshore platform to evaluate the performance of new instrumentation under development for offshore meteorological, oceanographic, and/or wildlife monitoring. Possible test sensors for the platform would include, but not limited to, radar wind profilers, thermodynamic profilers, surface atmospheric turbulence measurements, weather and precipitation measurement, wildlife tracking and monitoring instrumentation, and more. The test buoy was designed to accommodate a range of future sensors both above and below water and have additional electric power, mounting locations, and data storage. The buoy will be the first open-source buoy, where in the buoy architecture, control system, designs, communication protocols will be made publicly available. Herein, we will provide details of the test buoy validation, details of the instrumentation test buoy platform and how users (e.g. industry, academia, and national laboratories) can request use of the facility.
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