García, Raúl

Gutiérrez, Francisco J

Navarro, Gabriel

Ruiz, Javier

UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC

Abstract -The following article presents a new software whose purpose is to ease the operation of lagrangian drifters and the ulterior data retrieval. LD Manager relies on the use of TCP/IP communications between the drifters and the computer that runs this piece of software. It manages TCP connection requests from its clients, the drifters, and fills up a database with the information they sent. LD Tools is an easy-to-use interface that makes experiment organization and data retrieval much more efficiently.Keywords - lagragian drifter operation, TCP/IP communicationsLD MANAgErLD Manager is the piece of software that manages the communications with the drifters and that interacts with then under an eventual petition from the opera-tor of the software. It has been developed in Java, and a successful beta version has been generated and tested for Windows XP and Windows 7.As a background process, a TCP server runs in the computer where this software is installed. This process manages the connection requests from the drifters, es-tablishes the appropriate TCP sockets and refresh the connections in case of IP change. Figure 1 shows the flow of information between the server and the drifters. The data generated by the drifters is sent to the server via internet (orange path in figure 1). Therefore, the drifters must be equipped with modems able to imple-ment TCP/IP telecommunications. These data is stored in a database in the com-puter along with some other relevant information as the current drifter configu-rations and so on.Configuration change petitions (yellow path in figure 1) on the drifters can be handled by using an additional GSM modem. This modem send any configura-tion change request via SMS and waits for acknowledge from the drifter (blue path in figure 1).LD tOOLSLD Tools is an additional piece of software intended to organize lagrangian drift-er experiments and ease the data retrieval.Concerning experiment management, LD Tools allows creating, editing and ar-chiving experiments. As a lagrangian experiment may involve one or more drift-ers, this software relies on a database to organize all that information in order to recover it later on.Data retrieval may be done by focusing on the whole data set of a single drifter and then filtering the initial and final dates. However, the recommended data retrieval method is based on experiment identification. As an experiment has information on the drifters involved, the initial and final date of the experiments, data recovering with this method is usually faster and more efficient.fIELD tEStSuccessful tests have been performed in Spain (Gulf of Cadiz  and Alboran Sea – figure 2 –) and France (Ligurian Sea) so far.  Figure 1. Information flow between drifters and the server running LD Man-ager.Figure 2. One-drifter lagrangian experiments op-erated with LD Manager.Francisco J gutiérrez, Raúl garcía, gabriel Navarro, Javier Ruizdepartamento de Ecología y gestión Costera, Instituto de Ciencias Marinas de Andalucía, CSIC, 11519, Puerto Real, Spain.ld MANAgER ANd ld TOOlS: NEW SOFTWARE TO OPERATE lA-gRAgIAN dRIFTERSInstrumentation Viewpoint/11/ MARTECH11 82fUtUrE WOrkFurther collaborations all around Europe and other Mediterranean countries must be established in order to get user feedback and enrich this software so-lution.

LD Manager and ld tools: new software to operate lagragian drifters

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