The leader of the Seacams 2 project, Bangor University, has hired Nortek for the supply of three bottom mount acoustic instrument packages for use around the coast of North Wales.
Under the contract, valued at £250,000, the Norway-based oceanographic instrument manufacturer, Nortek, will provide equipment for measurements of wave-driven currents, wave spectra, integrated wave parameters, tidal currents, turbulence and water surface elevation in an energetic and shallow nearshore coastal environment.
The procurement is part of the Seacams 2 project led by the Centre for Applied Marine Sciences (CAMS) at Bangor University as part of a coastal observatory project for the measurement of oceanographic and water quality data, according to the Welsh government’s procurement website Sell2Wales.
The £17 million Seacams 2 project was backed with multi-million funding from the Welsh government in September 2016.
The Seacams 2 is expected to boost investment in renewable energy and sustainable resource sectors by facilitating the translation of research to business activity, meeting demand for coordinated information, data and modelling of coastal and marine processes.
The goal of the project, running until July 2019, is to develop a network of coastal observatories that will collect the information relevant for potential renewable energy developers, while the work will focus on information gathering around two marine renewable energy demonstration zones that lie off the north-west coast of Anglesey, and off the coast of Pembrokeshire.