ASL Environmental Sciences has combined its acoustic zooplankton fish profiler (AZFP) with its ice-profiling sonar (IPS) to provide a comprehensive solution for ice-thickness detection and water column profiling of fish, zooplankton, bubbles, and suspended sediments in ice-covered waters.

The AZFP6-ice is the next generation in high-resolution, low-power, continuously recording subsurface instruments that are capable of long-term deployments of a year or more.

The AZFP6-ice would typically be used in an upward-looking, taut-line mooring, and can easily be inverted to record the water column in a downward-looking orientation. Built into the ice-profiling sensor is a logarithmic detector that resolves both strong and weak acoustic targets. In practice, this means that the signal from strong reflections, such as the water-air interface at close range,
doesn’t saturate, and weak targets, such as the water-ice interface at long range, are still measurable.

A narrow-beam 420-kHz-frequency channel on this instrument (identical to the one used on ASL’s IPS) is used for high-spatial-resolution ice cover measurements. The three other calibrated fishery
acoustic channels of the instrument acquire details of constituent targets within the water column.

The memory capacity of this new-generation instrument has been upgraded to the now expanded 512-GB capacity using dual 256-GB SD cards, with plans to continue expanding memory capacity.

Learn more here.