An important project involving the Romanian-Bulgarian cooperation has established, since 2013 a new and complex environmental monitoring system in the Western Black Sea. The system consists of three offshore observatories, each including underwater modules and a coastal gauge limited to the surface module. The system, unique in the Black Sea area, is able to collect long-term real-time data for several key environmental parameters.
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Technical notes
The three Romanian offshore observatories (EUXRo01, EUXRo02 and EUXRo03) are moored 160 km from the Romanian Black Sea coast at about 90 m water depth.
Each of the offshore observatories consists of two main modules:
• Surface relay buoy (SRB)
• Instrumented mooring line (IML) and Underwater tsunami module (UTM)
The SRBs of the observatories EUXRo01, EUXRo03, are equipped with a weather station that continuously measures the wind speed and direction, temperature and pressure. The instrument also integrates a heading sensor, which allows the automatic correction of the wind direction for the buoy rotation.
The SRB of each observatory is also equipped with an environmental monitoring instrument pack, mounted on the buoy pole at 5 m water depth. The instrument pack includes a Doppler current meter, classic CTD sensors (conductivity, temperature, and pressure/depth) and sensors for measuring dissolved oxygen concentration, turbidity and chlorophyll. Auxiliary equipment of the SRB module include a communication box with GPS receiver, radio link allowing full control of the buoy from a nearby ship, iridium bilateral link with antenna for satellite data transmission to the terrestrial data center and reprogramming of the sensors, active and passive radar reflectors, IALA signaling light and four solar panel for recharging the batteries.