Hydrographic Survey Conducted By Private Organizations
Large scale hydrographic and geophysical survey is conducted by commercial entities, particularly in the dredging, marine construction, oil exploration & drilling industries. Industry installing submarine cable for communications or power require detailed surveys of cable routes prior to installation with increased use of acoustic imagery equipment previously found only in military applications. There are specialized companies with both the assets and expertise to contract for such surveys with both commercial and governmental entities.
Companies, Universities and investment groups will often fund Hydrographic surveys of public waterways prior to developing areas adjacent those waterways. Survey firms are also contracted to survey in support of design and engineering firms that are under contract for large public projects. Private surveys are also conducted before dredging operations and after these operations are completed. Companies with large private slips, docks or other water front installations have their facilities and the open water near their facilities surveyed regularly.
Crowd sourcing is also entering hydrographic surveying, with projects such as TeamSurv and ARGUS. Here, volunteer vessels record position, depth and time data using their standard navigation instruments, and then the data is processed on the server for speed of sound, tidal and other corrections. With this approach there is no need for a spercific survey vessel, or for professionally qualified surveyors to be on board, as the expertise is in the data processing that occurs once the data is uploaded to the server after the voyage. Apart from obvious cost savings, this also gives a continuous survey of an area, but the drawbacks are time in recruiting loggers and getting a high enough density of data. Also, although accurate to 0.1 - 0.2m, this approach does not have the accuracy and coverage of a multi-beam survey.
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