Moss Landing Verifies Ocean Color Data with MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox

The NOAA-NASA project requires that the MOS instruments equal or exceed the precision of the satellite sensors. To meet this requirement, Moss Landing must regularly monitor the instruments’ output and performance.

苔藓着陆研究人员使用两种MOS乐器。第一个部署在夏威夷兰岛夏威夷岛附近的海洋光学浮标（Moby）内。第二个是安装的船上的研究船，旅行太平洋，以获得更广泛的海洋颜色特征采样。

Each instrument brings different data quality control challenges. Because the MOBY is continually exposed to sea water, both the buoy and its onboard instruments are prone to degradation. The researchers who operate the shipboard MOS must collect data while the boat is operating in eight-foot waves that cause refraction in the subsurface light field, resulting in noisy measurements.

在项目开始时，MOSS登陆在旧VAX​​工作站上使用C程序来运行MOS仪器。这个解决方案是“一点点窒息，”威廉布罗根博士博士莫斯登陆项目领导者：“我们没有访问VAX上的命令行界面，因此一切都必须通过一个程序。”此外，vax机器沉重，繁琐。研究人员需要更灵活和便携的解决方案。

莫斯兰丁使用MATLAB和乐器Control Toolbox to control the MOS instruments from laptop computers.

The MOS instruments run on the Forth operating system. Broenkow and programmer Mike Feinholz wrote a library of functions based on Instrument Control Toolbox to send Forth commands to the MOS instruments to send and receive data. A TT7 microcomputer inside MOS interprets these functions and initiates the data collection. Analog/digital sensor output and spectral data are sent back through the serial port, where they are digitized, converted to scientific units, and sent to MATLAB for processing and analysis.

Moss Landing also uses MATLAB and Instrument Control Toolbox to deal with the problem of noisy data at sea. To ensure accurate results, the oceanographers take frequent measurements and average out the wave noise.

MOSS LANDENING开发了一种简化数据收集的GUI。从安装在船上的传感器和MOS上的光收集器测量表面辐照度。对于每个收集器，它们采用两个黑暗的扫描和五个光扫描，并使用他们开发的Matlab界面中的下拉菜单和可编辑的文本框选择扫描参数。然后，它们使用MATLAB函数平均出版波噪声，执行校准校正，并绘制最终数据。

Being able to carry out the instrument control functions in the same environment as that used to view, process, and analyze the data provides a great deal of flexibility, says Broenkow: “If the parameters on the incoming data need to be changed, we can enter commands on the spot, without involving process delays from one computer to another.”