A Microcomputer Based Ocean Observation System

A low cost, reliable, and flexible instrument package carried by a drifting buoy has been designed. Reliability and low cost, important factors if we are to obtain the spatial resolution required, have been achieved through the use of recently developed semiconductor technology, such as semiconductor transducers and LSI devices. The use of Intel´s 8080 microprocessor permits a system of high performance at only a small increase in cost. The basic design is flexible, i.e., it can not only take care of the initial set of measurements (air temperature, sea surface temperature, and atmospheric pressure), but can readily be adapted to measure other parameters of interest.