On behalf of the entire Hydro international team, may I wish you a healthy and prosperous New Year 2003. And to those readers who celebrate the start of a new year at another time, our best wishes are meant for you too, both now and on that special day.
I think we can safely say that the it was the need to determine a ship’s speed which led us, via ships speed sonars (dopplerlog), to the present state-of-the-art in measuring vertical profiles of speed of current from moving ships. Seeing at all the possibilities offered by the present current measuring equipment, we have made a big step from counting knots passing through our fingers (which gave us the unit ‘knot’) to today’s acoustic current profiling.
We owe quite a lot to Mr Christian Johann Doppler (an Austrian) who observed ‘his’ Doppler-effect. Not only is this a principle which we use to measure current, both acoustically and by HF-radar, but what would satellite positioning be without knowing and using this effect? Have we, as the maritime and surveying community, given Mr Doppler his due honour for this? Examples of our having done so would be welcomed.
From rivers to oceans, current profiles are important. For example, the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) that ended in 2002, provided twenty years of data on global (sub)surface velocities. This was accomplished not only by the use of acoustic doppler profilers on research ships, but also by the use of various types of floats. One of these are the ALACE-floats which float near the subsurface and raise themselves now and then to be positioned by the ARGOS-system. A next step in this technology is described in the article ‘Robots powered by the Ocean’.
Floats will stay around for some time in the wake of WOCE; in particular in the GODEA pilot project of GOOS (Global Ocean Observing System) (www.ioc.unesco.org/goos/). This GODEA - project (www.bom.gov.au/bmrc/ocean/godae) will try to prove the possibility of real-time, global ocean data assimilation for operational oceanography. Major improvements in data collection have been made since the time I was stationed on my first Navy ship. Previously emptied beer bottles were partially filled with sand so they would just float. A form giving the ship’s noon position was placed in the bottles, which were capped before being released. Those forms that were retrieved and sent back gave an indication of ocean currents. [Note to scientists in need of money or a reason for research: our bottle-project was sponsored by a beer company. We as crew considered it a great project – ‘Drinking for Science!’]
We welcome a new member to the Editorial Advisory Board of Hydro international: Mr Adam Greenland, the Deputy Port Hydrographer at the Port of London Authority and, perhaps more important to our readers, also Chairman of FIG Commission 4 (Hydrography). Mr Greenland, a former merchant marine deck officer, has a degree in Surveying and Mapping sciences. Besides all his other commitments, he is a lecturer for the MSc programme on hydrographic surveying at University College London. See also the interview with him in our October 2002 issue. We look forward both to his ‘Insiders View’ columns and his advice.

Enjoy reading.