On Monday morning hydrographic surveying students and staff from Te Kura Kairūri – The National School of Surveying and Te Tari Pūtaiao Taimoana – Department of Marine Science visited the Taihoro Nukurangi – National Institute of Water and Atmospheric (NIWA) Research Vessel RV Tangaroa. The boat was in town to support the James Cameron – Challenging The Deep Exhibition currently running at Otago Museum.
We were given an excellent tour of the ship, which is New Zealand's only ice-strengthened and dynamically positioned deep-water research vessel. Of particular interest was the equipment and applications we have been learning about in class, including; multibeam echosounding, motion sensing and precise offset measurement, underwater positioning using USBL, seabed sampling with grabs and cores, watercolumn CTD measurements.
Further information about the vessel can be found at NIWA.
Most of these students are currently taking the advanced hydrographic surveying paper SURV452 – Hydrographic Surveying 2 which covers:
- The fundamentals of acoustics
- Multibeam sonar systems
- Motion compensation
- Side scan sonar methods
- LiDAR bathymetry
- Acoustic positioning
- Calibration
- Reporting
- Charting and error analysis
- Electronic navigation charts.
For more information on SURV452 – Hydrographic Surveying 2.
Hydrographic surveying is one of the research themes at Te Kura Kairūri – The National School of Surveying, where we use similar equipment to that onboard the RV Tangaroa.
More information on our research can be found on our page – Hydrographic Surveying.
Our final-year students are in the process of applying for jobs when they finish studying in October this year – and some hope to end up working as hydrographers onboard vessels like the RV Tangaroa in the future, so it was also a valuable insight into the onboard living environment of a large sea-going vessel.
Thank you to Greg and the team for having us onboard!
