RONALD H. BROWN is one of the premier research vessels in the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean because it is a stable platform which supports a large suite of sensors for deep water data acquisition. This sensor suite is support by an advanced Network of high powered computers; including Windows 2000 Advanced Server software running on Dell PowerEdge 2650 Servers, and Windows 2000/XPpro client software running on Dell workstations as a well developed computer network, which integrates nearly all of the suite of diverse computers on board.
Nearly all of the scientific instrumentation is integrated into the same computer system. This ship wide networking allows centralization of data. Therefore, one central data set is logged and maintained instead of numerous independent data sets. This allows for easy collation of data from numerous sensors with different sampling rate. All data is time stamped and GPS position can be easily added to any data set. Data gathered, covers the spectrum from air temperature and relative humidity, to water depth and bathymetric charting, to sea water temperature. These sensors are better described in the scientific instrumentation section.
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