Category Archives: Technology

Airport: Wireless Technology at Race Rocks

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In April 2001, The APPLE Learning Interchange supplied an AirPort wireless Base Station and three AirPort cards for the iMacs at Race Rocks. Now all cameras could run on Wireless computers at Race Rocks.
We started experimenting by using the AirPort base station for wireless web casting in June of 2000 . This link shows several pictures of the AirPort in use at that time

Ryan describing what the divers were videoing underwater during a presentation in the QuickTime Live Conference in California. The webcast was done wireless to the AirPort base station in the marine science centre

Webcast to Conference in New York from underwater Race Rocks

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During a presentation to the ETC conference at the United Nations School in New York in the spring of 2001, we tried out the underwater audio link from DIVELINK . An audio signal is relayed by SONAR for Ryan to a receiver near the docks. This receiver was connected to the audio input on the G3 laptop computer and to the shore tender as well. Both voices could be carried by the Sorenson Broadcaster first by wireless AirPort and then onto the internet. In this way we were able to communicate from underwater in the Pacific Ocean live by internet to the Altlantic coast. In this video, Ryan Murphy, a student at Pearson College, operates the device and the camera was operated by Jean-Olivier Dalphond, also a student at the college.

Fouling on Sensor bar

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Already by March, the growth of algae on the environmental sensors and the aluminum bar has been prolific. Regular dives have to be made to keep the sensors free of algae. The predominant Genus here is Laminaria.

Installation of Sensor Bar underwater at Race Rocks

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In this video, the diving students of Lester Pearson College brave several cold hours in the water to bolt down the 5 meter aluminum sensor bar in 8 meters of water off the docks at Race Rocks. Faculty members Garry Fletcher and Chris Blondeau join them to help install the first three sensors.

The orange rope previously installed in the 3 inch conduit is attached to the top end of the sensor cables. These cables are pulled through the buried conduit from the installation location in the ocean, up to the top of the docks where they connect with the instrumentation to allow the data eventually to be made available on-line. The sensors are brought down by a diver and fitted to the bar as the cable gets pulled through. Next the crew straps the sensors and their electrical terminal boxes to the bar. The hydrophone points upwards, the other two sensors, for chlorophyll and turbidity point down. A special thanks is due to our video expert Jean-Olivier Dalphond for enduring almost three hours in the 8 degree Celsius water to video the process.

See other Diving Videos:

Witnessing the Wonders of the Race Rock Ecosystem

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Witnessing the Wonders of the Race Rock Eco-system … Only a Click Away!
Magazine article By Simon, Jeremy
Teach , November/December 2000

Just into range of the first camera, a large elephant seal crawls across the rock towards a group of smaller female seals near the top of the middle island at Race Rocks. Unbeknownst to the seal, he’s being watched not only by the student operating the camera but by hundreds of students from across British Columbia, and possibly more people from around the world via the Internet.

“The Racerocks.com Project is a unique project organized and run by Pearson College in Victoria, British Columbia,” said Garry Fletcher, educational director of racerocks.com. “Our project uses the latest technology to full advantage to create a dynamic, educational web experience of an extraordinary marine ecosystem at Race Rocks, Canada’s most southerly point in the Pacific,”

Since 1980, Race Rocks has been an ecological reserve and is internationally recognized as a Marine Protected Area. Located in the Strait of Juan de Fuca between Vancouver Island and Washington State, the small rocky outcrops of Rock Rocks is home to a diversity of marine and wild life such as seals, otters, sea lions, cormorants, gulls, and sea urchins. To learn about and better understand the ecology of the area, students from Pearson College use the latest technology as part of their studies.

One of ten United World Colleges, Pearson College has over 200 students from around the world enrolled in the two year International Baccalaureate program. As a faculty member of Environmental Systems and Biology, Garry Fletcher and his students are responsible for creating and maintaining the content of the web site.

The project is supported by various partners including The LGS Group, an IT consulting firm that provides project management and web design services. Another project partner is Telus, a leading telecommunications company, which has contributed the equipment, bandwidth and expertise to assure high-speed delivery of the web content. Several alumni of the college have assisted with the networking and Database work, and the Vancouver Aquarium Marine Science Centre, has committed expertise and significant funding to the project. B.C. Parks and the Millennium Partnership Fund are also key partners.

Apple’s affiliation to the racerocks.com project has been in providing some equipment and mostly technical support. The project uses Apple technology extensively and runs an Apple PowerMac G4 500 mgHz with Mac OS X Server as one of its web servers. Apple Canada has recently become a partner in the program providing a G3 Powerbook 500 mghz for the wireless webcasts from the intertidal and subtidal areas. A host of PC and Apple PowerMac computers are also used for capture of live video feeds being broadcast from the islands. Currently a series of environmental sensors are being installed, above and below water. Data from these will soon be accessible through an Oracle database. Video and Audio streaming is broadcast 24 hours daily using QuickTime Streaming Server software and generated by Sorenson Broadcaster software running on Macintosh Imacs.

Operated by students, as many as seven digital cameras and various data sensors, both above and under water, record what is occurring at Race Rocks and then broadcast the feeds during live video and audio events scheduled over a number of days.

Recently, the project has begun to use Apple’s wireless Airport technology, which enables students to roam the island with an Apple PowerBook G3 linked to the underwater or on shore cameras. The signal is linked to the project’s Local Area Network on the island, which is connected to the College by a compressed, microwave radio link, being transmitted on top of the Race Rocks lighthouse tower. At the College, the signal is decompressed and sent out over the internet.

“A key goal of the project is to encourage teachers to create internet-based curriculum, which will enable their students to have a fully engaging experience learning about the unique ecology of Race Rocks,” said Fletcher. ” As an example, we just recently supported a number of schools across B.C. to connect to our web site during one of our many scheduled live video streaming events. A team of students helped in providing two weeks of programming from above and below the water to schools via the internet. We hope to encourage other schools to take on similar projects and “Adopt a Sensitive Ecosystem” so that they can also share ecological information. These schools’ students were able to talk directly to our College’s underwater student divers and ask questions about what they were seeing being broadcast live via the web site.”

As the racerocks.com project continues to broaden its use of its technology, more creative and innovative programs will be planned to help the College’s students study the diversity of the Race Rock outcrops and share their findings with other students in Canada and around the world.

To check out how the large elephant seal is doing and learn more about Race Rocks, you can visit the web site at www.racerocks.com.

Race Rocks goes Live on at the Quick-Time Live Conference in California

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On October 11 2000, a special live webcast from Race Rocks was arranged for a presentation at the Distance Education session by faculty member Garry Fletcher at the QuickTme Live Conference in Beverly Hills. The Apple Learning Interchange, an educational arm of Apple at the time had helped with the funding to register and stay at the conference.

Photos by Jaffar. Our thanks to Tiyona and Michael, also in the racerocks.com activity, who helped behind the scenes to make this webcast a success in California! ‘

NOTE: Followup on Damien Guihen doing research in Antarctica

“From my perspective, standing on a stage in front of more than 150 people in the conference centre in California, this was a big risk .. We had already done it to an Apple Conference in New York, but this was the first time the students were managing it completely on their own from the RaceRocks end. Although this was a QuickTime Live conference, several members of the audience remarked later after that this was the first real  “Live”and remote presentation they had seen at the Conference. Connections were made at that time with several companies interested in us using their webcasting software. ” Garry Fletcher 

Ryan Murphy films underwater at West Race Rocks

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This video was shot by the team of Pearson College divers while practicing for the live webcast for the QuickTime Live Conference in California- Oct 2000 .

On the 4th of October, a 5 member diving team brought the camera to West Race Rock to film the marine life there. Along with Red Sea Urchins (Strongylocentrotus franciscanus), Plumose Anemones (Metridium farcimen), and a Tiger Rockfish (Sebastes nigrocinctus) was a large school of Black Rockfish (Sebastes melanops). The camera crew for the dive was J.O. Dalphond, Hana Boye, and myself. Organism identification responsibility falls on me. Hinted streaming video time is 3 minutes 22 secs
My name is Ryan Murphy and I am a Year 26 Pearson Student from Newfoundland. I am doing the editing on this movie. I’m the diver with the blue snorkel signalling “OK” at the beginning. Garry, our Guru, is showing me how to do this in iMovie as this is my first movie, I hope you enjoy it.

Interview by CBC reporter Loreen Pindera (PC year3)

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In this interview for the CBC program “The World This Weekend” by CBC reporter Loreen Pindera (Pearson College student, year 3) with Garry Fletcher, faculty member at Lester Pearson College. they discuss how a fragile ecosystem can be loved to death by too many people wanting to visit it, The solution for the Race Rocks Ecological reserve was to use the technology of the internet to bring this island ecosystem in the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the world while conserving this fragile ecosystem -Sept 16/2000.

Turbulence and Mixing Estimates Using a Towed Horizontal microstructure Profiler

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Paul Macoun: Turbulence and Mixing Estimates Using a Towed Horizontal microstructure Profiler

Turbulence and mixing estimates using a towed horizontal microstructure profiler.
Paul Macoun

The Ocean Turbulence Laboratory

University of Victoria

The Purpose

Mixing is the key element in the redistribution of salt, heat and energy in the ocean. Understanding the mechanisms and magnitude of turbulence and other mixing processes is crucial to the improvement of models that predict oceanic and atmospheric change. Our elusive goal is the parameterization of the vertical fluxes of salt and heat based upon the physics of oceanic mixing processes.

The horizontal profiler TOMI (Towed Ocean Microstructure Instrument) is used to make simultaneous measurements of temperature, conductivity, vertical velocity, and their fluctuations. The measurement of vertical velocity provides a means of estimating the rate of dissipation of turbulent kinetic energy. The respective products of instantaneous velocity and temperature, and that of velocity and conductivity, provide a direct measure of the vertical fluxes of heat and salt.

Simultaneous vertical profiles of current and its shear from a ship mounted ADCP (Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler) provide a means to relate the measured fluxes to the Froude Number and the Buoyancy Reynolds Number over a wide range of these parameters. The efficiency of mixing, the ratio of buoyancy-to-kinetic energy production, reaches 0.5 in near coastal regions and is generally much larger than the value of 0.2 assumed to apply to the open ocean.

This analysis is to be the first task to undertake with respect to the data set collected at Race Rocks on August 17th, 2000. At present, the processing is at a preliminary stage.

The Instrument

TOMI is a towed oceanographic vehicle designed to measure turbulence in both shallow and deep water. TOMI can support a multitude of instruments, from sonar to underwater cameras. Its primary oceanographic and electronic sensors are as follows:

1) Four airfoil shear probes and two fast-response thermistors on the nose.

2) A seabird temperature and conductivity sensor adjacent to the nose probes.

3) A seabird temperature and conductivity sensor, and a flowmeter, on the upper mast.

4) A seabird temperature and conductivity sensor, and a flowmeter, on the lower mast.

5) A pressure sensor mounted mid-body, internally.

6) An inertial motion sensor package, internal.

The sample rates for these instruments vary from 64 samples per second up to 512 samples per second. The airfoil shear probe is a unique instrument that measures the cross-stream component of velocity. The force generated by cross-stream flow bends a tiny ceramic bi-morph beam, which generates a voltage that is amplified and recorded. The motion sensor contains accelerometers and gyros. Its presence is required because of low frequency body motion contamination that finds its way into the shear probe signals. By having a record of the vehicle’s behaviour, the probe signals can be decontaminated through processing.

(Photos to be added)

Return to P. Macoun- Oceanographic Research