OpenCTD Documentation and Validation Workshop
Oceanography for Everyone
AWARD AMOUNT
Oceanography for Everyone is an informal collective working on developing the OpenCTD, a low-cost, open-source oceanographic instrument that measures conductivity, temperature, and depth. These measurements allow ocean scientists to assess ocean health and better understand our changing oceans. In addition, the OpenCTD is designed to be built, calibrated, and deployed by end-users, reducing the barrier to entry for ocean stakeholders working in science and conservation.
The OpenCTD documentation and validation workshop brought together contributors to the OpenCTD project with the goals of updating all the OpenCTD documentation to the current specifications and standards; conducting field trials against known, calibrated commercial CTDs; and introducing the local academic community to the potential for low-cost, open-source scientific instrumentation.
This workshop consisted of a two-day documentation-a-thon, where project leads and community members built and documented the OpenCTD assembly process, updated the instruction manuals and solicited feedback on the instructor syllabus for running classroom workshops. After going through a calibration process, the newly built CTDs will be deployed in the Chesapeake Bay in conjunction with calibrated, commercial CTDs from the University of Maryland to provide data validation for the OpenCTD.
This OpenCTD documentation and validation workshop has two main deliverables:
- An updated Build Guide for the OpenCTD, along with extensive photo documentation of the process, to be shared via GitHub.
- A peer-reviewed publication providing an overview of the OpenCTD as well as the comparative data produced during this workshop, to be published open access in a relevant peer-reviewed journal such as Oceanography or HardwareX.
With the workshop, the organisers also aimed to provide an opportunity to invite participation from the UMD Horn Point community, including students, faculty, and staff. The goal of this is to not only validate the quality of the OpenCTD construction but also to introduce the potential of open-source scientific hardware more broadly to the academic community. The workshop was attended by participants with experience levels ranging from early-career oceanographers with no electronics background, to award-winning educators with deep knowledge of how to design hands-on curricula for educators, to seasoned electronics engineers with decades of experience in the DIY electronics community.
Participants spent the first two days building the control unit and sensor package of the OpenCTD, calibrating it and testing it in preparation for day 3. On day 3 they were able to test the bare housings down to a depth of 15m to ensure that they remained watertight, and to deploy both CTDs to collect data and generate water column profiles from these two CTD casts. In the lab, participants went through the workflow for data management and processing and brainstorming strategies to better incorporate data analysis into a teacher syllabus.
The organisers are now making plans to join the next available research day cruise out on the Chesapeake Bay that will allow us to piggyback on their commercial CTD casts. Andrew Thaler is working with the Talbot County Free Library to schedule a public talk at the Easton or St. Michaels library branch and the OpenCTD team have already received a request to conduct a similar workshop for oceanography undergraduates at St. Mary’s College.
Reference Number: SEF-100-2023
