Mooring (oceanography)

The mooring is held up in the water column with various forms of buoyancy such as glass balls and syntactic foam floats.

Long-term moorings can be deployed for durations of two years or more, powered with alkaline or lithium battery packs.

The buoyancy of the floats, i.e. of the top buoy plus additional packs of glass bulbs of foam, is sufficient to carry the instruments back to the surface.

Prawlers (profiling crawlers) are sensor bodies which climb and descend the cable, to observe multiple depths.

The influence of currents (and wind if the top buoy is above the sea surface) can be modeled and the shape of the mooring line can be determined by software.

Mooring as deployed in Fram Strait with top buoy , a CTD -sensor, two rotor current meters , acoustic release and train wheels as anchor .
WHOI moored surface buoy with meteorological sensors and satellite transmitters [ 1 ]
Syntactic foam sphere used as a subsurface float