Design of underwater ultrasonic distance measurement using in arctic sea ice melting monitoring with high precision

In order to get the ice melting rate and the acousto-optic reflection characteristics of sea ice profile, the acoustic ranging system and the auxiliary environment parameter measurement system are developed. The instrument collects the underwater ultrasonic sensor's data via the RS485 bus, store the data to SD card and then send them to computer by iridium satellite. Its main advantages are that lossless, non-contact and high precision so that it is suitable for melting information monitoring of sea ice. In the paper the proposed hardware architecture and software architecture are presented. Due to the result obtained during the experimental tests, the proposed instrument can be considered as a reference of monitor application on sea ice melting.