The Undulating Oceanographic Recorder Mark 2: A New Ship-of-Industry Ocean Monitoring Instrument

The Undulating Oceanographic Recorder (UOR) Mark 2 has been designed and developed by the Institute for Marine Environmental Research (IMER). It is an automatic, instrumented towed vehicle which can be programmed to undulate between a minimum depth of 5 m and a selected maximum between 15 and 100 m with a selected undulation length between 0.8 km and 40 km. It collects continuous plankton samples while simultaneously making discrete measurements of temperature, pressure, salinity and in situ chlorophyll a. Results from a recent cruise off Chesapeake Bay are presented and the instrument is discussed in terms of its application to pollution monitoring.