The MELOA project proposed to develop a low-cost, easy-to-handle, wave resilient, multi-purpose, multi-sensor, extra light ocean surface drifter for use in all water environments, ranging from deep-sea to inland waters, including coastal areas, river plumes and surf zones. The device was developed as an upgrade to the WAVY drifter conceived by the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, Portugal, which was used to measure the surface circulation forced by wave breaking, including detailed structure of rip and littoral drift currents. A family of drifters resulted from the project: the WAVY family of drifters, each optimised for a particular environment or application.
The overall objective of MELOA was to innovate in the current market of measurement systems for marine environments, by providing a low-cost and easy-to-handle solution for in-situ data acquisition on the water, in the form of the WAVY drifters. In fact, most ocean drifters developed to date have focused on either the characterization of sub-surface currents, or on superficial currents, but with a strong influence from the wind on the drifter itself. MELOA solved the problem of minimizing exposure to wind (the so called "sail-effect") in order to get a more accurate description of the movement of the water, while maintaining good power and communications capabilities (either via mobile networks or via satellite) for the transmission of data to shore.
On another note, drifters are usually not designed to withstand the very harsh conditions of nearshore and littoral ocean circulation (i.e. the movement of ocean waters at the coast, including the breaking of waves and the motions that occur in the surf zone). MELOA developed products that can sustain high accelerations and impacts, and are thus ideal to measure and quantify properties of motion in these extreme locations. This is a tremendous achievement and will have several important applications, such as (just to name one) an accurate description and visualization of water movement in beaches, which in many cases constitute hazards to unaware beach goers.
The WAVY drifters were subjected to many tests at sea and in the laboratory; a comparison of the data produced by the WAVYs against the data from other instruments or sources helped validate the WAVYs as a good tool for ocean observation. A set of use cases was also implemented in the project, with the participation of different user communities (project team, scientists, citizens) to promote the drifters, assemble feed-back from users and facilitate a future entry in the market.
