BioSHADE is a shadowband attachment for the C-OPS Surface Reference instrument. The instrument uses a shading band that covers 180° of rotation enabling it to be used on boats or ships where the heading is not constant. When on a ship, the band's motion is a smooth sweep from 0° to 180°.
The software running the BioSHADE ("µProfile" for C-OPS or XRR profiling systems, or "µLogger" for GUVis-3511systems) contains controls for the BioSHADE, allowing the user to enable or disable shadowbanding, and to set the frequency of movement.
BioSHADE integrates seamlessly into a C-OPS, XRR, or GUVis-3511 system and supports a BioGPS in addition to the surface reference instrument. This assembly of BioSHADE, BioGPS, and Radiometer is supported by a single cable and can be located as far as 125 m away from the C-OPS/XRR deck box, or 100m from the GUVis-3511 Control Module. The deck box and control module power conditioning circuitry automatically compensates for cable length to provide optimal power to the system.
Figure 1 shows a typical C-OPS BioSHADE deployment where it is paired with an Ed0 surface reference radiometer and a BioGPS accessory
Figure 2 shows the BioSHADE assembly installed on a small boat. In this application, the built in angle (pitch and roll) sensors and high Ed0 radiometer sample rates can be used to filter data to eliminate episodes of excessive ship tilt.
For a more complete description of BioSHADE, download chapter 5 dealing from the NASA Technical Memorandum "Advances in Measuring the Apparent Optical Properties (AOPs) of Optically Complex Waters," NASA Tech. Memo. 2010–215856.
