WII6 is the sixth generation of the Waves In Ice buoy, the instrument behind more than a decade of sea-ice wave science. It has a new 32-bit board, Iridium Certus through a RockBLOCK 9704 with messages of about 100 kB (around 300 times the old SBD limit), the wave maths running on the buoy itself, and a WiFi dashboard for the bench and the deck.
The smallest message is 326 bytes of wave results. You choose the capture length, sampling rate and reporting interval, and which captures send a power spectrum, a 2 Hz record or the full-rate data. The full record stays on the card.
The buoy
STM32 on Zephyr, Iridium Certus and a hull built for ice, with the sensor, sampling and schedule built to your specification.
Interfaces
A dashboard over WiFi on the bench and the deck, a command shell that reaches every subsystem, and the WII6 cloud for deployments, buoys, commands and downloads.
The maths
Significant wave height, peak period, the spectrum and the directional spectrum, from a library that runs on the buoy’s processor and is tested against reference data whenever the maths changes.
Your data
Every record, message and run is kept in one write-once store you can copy with rsync. The formats are named and versioned, so a message from any deployment still decodes.
Heritage
The line runs from the 2012 NIWA array and the 2014 Nature paper to the KOPRI fleet of 2024. The deployments, the public datasets and the open source live on the WII5 site.
Talk to us
Planning a deployment, or want a buoy on your bench? WII6 is on the bench on development boards, with the first main board drawn. Tell us the season and the site.
More than a decade in the ice: the deployments