SBIR Grant for FarSounder Crowdsourced Bathymetry
FarSounder has been awarded a NOAA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I grant. This award provides FarSounder funding for the research and development of a project entitled: “Enabling Expanded Crowdsourced Bathymetry Contributions With High-Quality Metadata via Commercially Sustainable Incentives to Contributors.”
This project will develop a cloud-based service to share survey data collected by FarSounder customers. The data will be able to be shared with others across the FarSounder customer fleet and with crowdsourcing initiatives such as Seabed 2030 via the International Hydrographic Organization’s Data Centre for Digital Bathymetry’s Crowdsourced Bathymetry database.
To date, less than 25 percent of the world’s seafloor has been mapped. In many places, the bathymetry of the seafloor can change dramatically over time due to seasonal and storm-related conditions. In addition to its real-time, forward-looking capabilities, FarSounder’s Argos sonars can produce a bathymetric survey of everywhere the vessel goes. The survey data include high-quality metadata with accurate vessel, sensor and GPS details. The clear next step is to get these detailed surveys off the vessels and into the cloud for broader use.
“FarSounder customers have been submitting data to the IHO’s Data Center for Digital Bathymetry for some time,” said CEO Matthew Zimmerman. “This project will not only make these efforts easier for all involved parties, it will open the opportunity to share and use this crowdsourced data to countless others.”