BOSS Bio-Optical Sensor System

A flexible platform that expands sensor capabilities of profiling floats by providing multispectral radiometry, scattering, beam attenuation, chlorophyll, and CDOM measurements to complement the temperature, salinity and oxygen measurements of the profiling float.

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The Bio-Optical Sensor System (BOSS) is an integrated suite of instruments developed for deployment on profiling float arrays to observe biogeochemical parameters at global scales. The BOSS is a flexible package that expands the sensor capability of profiling floats by providing multispectral radiometry, scattering, beam attenuation, chlorophyll, and CDOM measurements to complement the standard suite of parameters that includes temperature, salinity and oxygen.

The BOSS system manages data collection to minimize energy consumption. The instrument synchronizes multi-parameter sampling and logs the data including the pressure, temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen data from the host profiling float with a common time reference to facilitate post processing.

Jointly developed by Satlantic and WET Labs, the BOSS system is currently in production in three sensor suite variants.

BOSS Sensor Options

Bio-Optical Sensor System		Variant
Sensors	Parameters	Standard	Lite	Mini
	Time	x	x	x
	Heading, Pitch, Roll	x	x	x
Radiometry	PAR		x	x
	E_d(412 nm)	x	x	x
	E_d(443 nm)	x	x	x
	E_d(490 nm)	x	x	x
	E_d(555 nm)	x
	L_u(412 nm)	x
	L_u(443 nm)	x
	L_u(490 nm)	x
	L_u(555 nm)	x
Fluorometry	Chlorophyll	x	x	x
Fluorometry	CDOM	x	x	x
Scattering	b_b(412 nm)	x	x	x
	b_b(440 nm)	x
	b_b(700 nm)	x	x	x
Beam Attenuation	c(650 nm)	x	x

SatCon

SatCon is a software utility for converting raw binary data, as logged by SatView, into readable ASCII text suitable for import by third party applications such as spreadsheets or databases. Data can be extracted in calibrated physical units or raw binary counts. SatCon can be operated interactively through a user friendly graphical interface, or in batch mode as a background process.

For minimum system requirements, installation instructions, and new features, please refer to the release notes in the SatCon User Manual.