@article {5165, title = {Multibeam Advisory Committee -- Improving Data Quality Across the US Academic Fleet}, year = {2013}, month = {April 16-18}, address = {Boston, MA, United States}, abstract = {

Data quality from multibeam echosounders can vary dramatically across the US academic fleet for a number of reasons including undetected hardware failures, suboptimal configurations or even misguided acquisition practices.\ The net result for the primary users of these systems, the scientific community, is a high level of uncertainty when undertaking mapping expeditions with the worst case scenario being the discovery that a system is non-functional on the first day of the cruise.

A 2010 NSF meeting was held to address these problems with one major outcome of the meeting being the recommendation to form a group of system experts to aid in assessment and improvement of multibeam systems across the fleet. The University of New Hampshire\&$\#$39;s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping teamed with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and submitted a successfully funded joint NSF proposal to form such a team in 2011.

In this talk, we will discuss some of the strategies we\&$\#$39;ve taken thus far including ship system assessment procedures, documentation and dissemination of best practices and deployment of software tools to aid in these regards.

}, keywords = {multibeam advisory committee}, author = {Beaudoin, Jonathan}, editor = {Paul Johnson and Vicki L Ferrini} }