This paper presents the design of a hybrid system named the Mooring Buoys Observation System for Benthic with Electro Optical Mechanical Cable (MBOSBC) for long-term mooring buoy observation in deep oceans. MBOSBC is comprised of three main modules: a surface buoy, a benthic node, and an Electro-Optical-Mechanical (EOM) cable. The Surface buoy provides energy for the entire system, the Benthic node is used to observe scientific phenomena on the seabed, and the Electro-Optical-Mechanical (EOM) cable connects the sea surface buoy and the benthic observation node, serving as the information and power transmission link. This paper provides design criteria for a single point mooring buoy using an EOM cable. The environmental load of the buoy under varying wind, wave, and current conditions is analyzed and the mooring hydrodynamic force of EOM is calculated. After calculating the load of the EOM cable under extreme marine conditions, the hydrodynamic force needed for the system is analyzed. After physically testing the strength of the designed EOM cable, a near-shore test of MBOSBC was carried out, in order to verify that the system has the expected function.

Marine submerged buoys can effectively obtain various parameters of seawater, which plays an important role in the research of marine physical phenomena, marine environmental changes, and climate change. However, traditional self-contained submerged buoys usually work underwater at a depth of about 100 m, and the observation data cannot be obtained before their recovery, which cannot satisfy the needs of real-time data acquisition for marine scientific research. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a real-time communication subsurface mooring system that consists of a satellite communication buoy (SCB), conductivity–temperature–depth sensors (CTD), and an inductive coupling mooring cable. The underwater inductive coupling link collects the data from the underwater sensors and transmit it to the SCB. Then, the data will be transmitted to the station receiver via satellite communication module integrated into the SCB. In order to ensure a high success rate of data recovery, the stress analysis and hydrodynamic simulation of the SCB were carried out in this paper. The results show that the SCB maintained a relatively stable attitude in the 3–4 sea state. The attitude data obtained from the subsequent sea trial was consistent with the simulation results, and the success rate of satellite communication during this period was more than 95%. In this paper, a modular embedded hardware circuit was designed to meet the functional requirements of the subsurface mooring system. An efficient data recovery strategy was also developed, which ensured that the average power consumption of the system was low and the success rate of data recovery is not less than 90% when operating in the severe sea state for a long time. The system underwent sea trials in the South China Sea for more than 3 months from the end of 2021 to the beginning of 2022. It transmitted more than 2034 sets of seawater profile temperature, salinity, and depth data in real-time, with a success rate of over 91% of the total sample data. The CTD data returned in real-time from our system is consistent with the data of the HYCOM and World Ocean Atlas (WOA), and a cyclonic mesoscale eddy was detected in the operation area.

This paper presents the design and implementation of a low-cost directional inertial wave sensor, DWS19-2, which is suitable for installation on ocean air-sea coupling buoys, offshore environmental monitoring buoys and surface drifting buoys. DWS19-2 integrates an STM32F446 embedded controller with a 9-axis MEMS inertial module QZ901 to measure buoy pitch, roll, heading and accelerations. These parameters are further used to calculate wave parameters and estimate directional and non-directional wave spectra. These wave parameters and spectral information are then reported to the buoy data logger for real-time transmission to shore-based data centers. Details of the electrical design and onboard wave processing algorithm (coordinate projection, numerical integration in the frequency domain, time-based wave parameters, frequency-based wave parameters, directional wave spectrum), in addition to turntable tests, filed marine comparison with DWR-MKIII wave buoy and related ocean observation applications enabled by this device, are described in this paper.

A moveable lander has the advantages of low cost and strong controllability and is gradually becoming an effective autonomous ocean observation platform. In this study, the hydrodynamic property of the Lingyun moveable lander, which has completed experiments in the Mariana Trench in 2020, is analyzed with the semiempirical method and computational fluid dynamic (CFD) method. We calculate the inertial hydrodynamic coefficients and viscous hydrodynamic coefficients of the lander. The results show that the CFD can provide the hydrodynamic property for the moveable lander’s design. The dynamic equations and kinematic equations are completely constructed combined with the hydrodynamic coefficients. Subsequently, this paper utilized the PID control method and control method to control the motions of the lander. The simulation results show that the methods accurately follow the preplanned path.

Editorial: Deep-sea observation equipment and exploration technology