Multibeam echosounders, also known as Swathe (British English) or Swath (American English) echosounders, originated in the late 1950s, originally for military applications. They were developed in the 1970s by the US Navy, in conjunction with General Instruments to map large swaths of the ocean floor to assist the underwater navigation of its submarine force. Starting in the 1970s, companies such as General Instruments (now SeaBeam Instruments, part of L3/Klein) in the United States, Krupp Atlas (now Atlas Hydrographic) and Elac Nautik (now part of L3 Communications) in Germany, Simrad (now Kongsberg Maritime) in Norway and RESON in Denmark developed systems that could be mounted to the hull of large ships, and then small boats (as technologies improved and operating frequencies increased).
The first commercial multibeam is now known as the SeaBeam Classic and was put in service in May 1977 (Farr, Marine Geodesy, Volume 4, Issue 2 1980 , pages 77 - 93) on the Australian survey vessel HMAS Cook. This system produced up to 16 beams across a 45 degree swath.
The second SeaBeam Classic installation was on the French Research Vessel Jean Charcot sometime after the Cook. The SB Classic arrays on the Charcot were damaged in a grounding and the SeaBeam was replaced with an EM120 in 1991. Although it seems that the original installation was not used much the others were widely used and subsequent installations were made on many vessels.
SeaBeam Classic systems were subsequently installed on the US academic Research Vessesl Thomas Washington (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California), the Robert D. Conrad (Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University) and the Atlantis II (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.)
The term "SeaBeam Classic" was coined after the manufacturer developed newer systems such as the SeaBeam 2000 and the SeaBeam 2112 in the late 1980s.
As technology improved in the 1980s and 1990s, higher frequency systems suitable for high-resolution mapping in shallow water were developed, and such systems are widely used for shallow water hydrographic surveying in support of navigational charting. Multibeam echosounders are also commonly used for geological and oceanographic research, and since the 1990s for offshore oil and gas exploration and seafloor cable routing.
In 1989, Atlas Electronics (Bremen, Germany) installed a second generation deep sea multibeam called Hydrosweep DS on the German research vessel Meteor. The Hydrosweep DS (HS-DS) produced up to 59 beams across a 90 degree swath which was a vast improvement and was inherently ice-strengthened. HS-DS systems were installed on the Meteor (Germany), the Maurice Ewing (US) and the Sagar Kanya (India) in 1990 and subsequently on a number of other vessels including the Thomas Thompson (US) and Hakurei Maru (Japan.)
External links
- Seabeam Instruments
- Atlas Hydrographic
- Kongsberg Multibeams
- Reson SeaBat
- Elac Multibeam Sonars
- MB-System open source software for processing multibeam data
- News and application articles of multibeam equipment on Hydro International; Product Survey Multibeam Shallow Water; Product Survey Multibeam Deep Water
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