eMOLT Haul Bottom Temperature

The Environmental Monitors on Lobster Traps and Large Trawlers (eMOLT) project is a collaboration of fishing industry, NOAA, and academics devoted to monitoring of the physical environment of the Gulf of Maine and the Southern New England shelf. In a series of NOAA-related funding beginning in 2001 including a) Northeast Consortium, b) NEFSC's Northeast Cooperative Research Program, and, most recently, c) IOOS-Ocean Technology Transition Program, we developed low-cost strategies to measure bottom temperature, salinity, and current velocity with the help of over 100 fixed and mobile gear fishermen dispersed along the entire New England coast. The current system utilizes a wireless water temperature & depth sensor on the gear, a micro-computer with a screen in the wheelhouse, and deck-mounted satellite transmitter in order to get bottom temperatures in real-time as fishermen haul their gear. The objective in the long run is to routinely assimilate this data into numerical ocean models in both hindcast and forecast modes.