08/12/2026
It is time for our annual SummerHydro updates!
SummerHydro is our eight-week hydrographic field-surveying program taught by Semme Dijkstra together with Dan Tauriello, Matt Rowell, and Roland Arsenault. The course is the capstone of our Ocean Mapping curriculum at the UNH Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping (CCOM). Before going to sea, the students completed two weeks of training in Teledyne CARIS and QPS software, complementing their earlier work with Xylem HYPACK and Trimble Applanix POSPac. Also earlier in the year the students were walked through various aspect of mobilization using a T51r MBES kindly provided by Teledyne Reason. This post will then focus on the mobilization of our research vessel, the R/V Gulf Surveyor (RVGS)—which followed a week of planning (The students also mobilized our uncrewed surface vessel, Bizzyboat—but USV work deserves a post of its own).
On RVGS, we operate two fully integrated swath-sonar systems in parallel: a “production” system and a “fault-injection” system. The production system supports routine data acquisition. The resulting survey data are submitted to NOAA for potential inclusion in local chart products. To date, data submitted by every previous SummerHydro class have been accepted and used—adding an essential dose of realism and professional accountability to the students’ work. Once installed, verified, and calibrated, this system remained unchanged throughout the course. (See photos for individual system components.)
The fault-injection system serves a very different purpose: developing the students’ quality-assurance, troubleshooting, and problem-solving skills. After the students have configured and verified the system, elements of its configuration are deliberately altered. They must first recognize that something has changed, diagnose the consequences, and then either restore the system to its previous state or update the configuration parameters to match its current physical state. (See photos for this year’s fault-injection system components.)
In any of our mobilization the students begin with boxes of equipment, a small collection of manuals, an explanation of what the integrated systems must accomplish, and access to our cranes and tools. This requires them to approach survey systems differently from how they encounter them in the classroom. Instrument specifications still matter—but so do mounting arrangements, cable routing, interfaces, power requirements, reference points, accessibility, dimensional control, and the practical realities of installing equipment safely on a working vessel. This phase of the course often reveals capabilities that we deem important and that are less visible in a classroom or aboard an already-integrated survey platform: adaptability, spatial reasoning, mechanical aptitude, communication, leadership, and persistence.
One of the most valuable exercises is also one of the seemingly simplest, but in reality, challenging: asking the students to create a complete system diagram. Doing so forces them to understand every component, connection, interface, reference frame, and data path. More importantly, it helps them connect the system architecture to the acquired data—and understand how problems in one part of the system may manifest themselves elsewhere. We think that ability to see the survey system as a whole is one of the most important lessons of SummerHydro. Feedback on the fault injection exercises as well as identifying actual problems consistently identifies this exercise as a critical learning experience.
Not to be forgotten is the most essential part of integration: the visit of the entire class to a local ice cream parlor after finishing the mobilization!
