A data acquisition and analysis system for coastal ocean measurements

A rapidly expanding high priority coastal engineering research and development requirement is to provide prototype wave, current and tide information from the littoral coastal zone for computational modeling, experimental investigations, and project design. In the last eight years, coastal data acquisition has grown from a few self-contained systems into three major data collection efforts with a total of 25 near-real-time systems and numerous self-contained systems. To meet the demand for additional field sites, the Prototype and Analysis System (PMAS) was developed. An analysis of requirements determined the entity-objects and attributes necessary to complete data acquisition, storage, and reduction. An object oriented model was applied to these entity-objects resulting in a relational database whose contents are used to control each task. Sample data, sample data descriptors, sensor calibrations, analysis results, and analysis result descriptors are examples of entity-objects