OSIL’s (Ocean Scientific International Ltd.) expertise as a system provider were recently employed on a wave and current survey in Yemen, the end user for the data being a well known French oil company.  The application’s purpose is to collect current and wave data of shallow waters in support of a wider metocean study.  The OSIL custom-built system included two Nortek AWACs for measuring current speed and directional waves, a Nortek Internal Wave Processor and a steel armoured data cable to transport the data once collected.

The AWACs were configured with the 2 km cable, which OSIL designed and built specifically for this application, along with the casing for the wave processor.  The cable’s design consists of an inner layer of polyurethane, a middle steel braided layer, followed by an outer polyurethane coating, to reduce any abrading that the seabed may cause to the cable.  The cable’s function is to carry the collected data from the AWACs to the external wave processor, where the data will be reduced into more concise sets before it is telemetered via GSM back to a base station in the United Kingdom.  This arrangement will lower the costs of transporting the data and lowers the risk for potential data drop-out.