Buoy on WII5 — Waves In Ice Buoys

SIPEX II — East Antarctica 2012

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The second Sea Ice Physics and Ecosystem Experiment (SIPEX II) deployed five WIIOS units along a meridional transect from the RV Aurora Australis across East Antarctic sea ice in 2012. The mission investigated relationships between the physical sea-ice environment, marine biogeochemistry, and Southern Ocean ecosystem structure.

Location: East Antarctic sea ice
Year: 2012
Vessel: RV Aurora Australis
Instruments: 5 × WIIOS
Records: 268 wave records

Where to get the data

The full dataset is published on Mendeley:

WII4 Sub-type A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Placeholder for one of the WII4 variants. Photos, deployment notes, and any variant-specific differences from the main WII4 design go here.

WII5 Sub-type A

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Placeholder for one of the WII5 variants. Photos, deployment notes, and any variant-specific differences from the main WII5 design go here.

WII1 to WII3

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The first three WII generations were research prototypes — single-build or small-batch units that proved out the sensors, communications, and deployment patterns later productised in WII4 and WII5.

WII1 — the original 2012 AVR-based buoy. Modular firmware (ADC, GPS, IMU, SD, temperature) running on a custom MegaPro 3.3 V board.
WII2 — 2014 Scott Base build. Added the MPU9150 IMU, Kistler high-precision accelerometer, and Iridium SBD telemetry at 2–8 Hz.
WII3 — successor with the WatchDog AVR + Linux dashboard architecture, deployed at French Island, Port Phillip, and NIWA test sites through 2016–17.

Status: placeholder. Per-generation history, photos, and deployment notes to follow.

PIPERS — Ross Sea 2017

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Polynyas, Ice Production, and seasonal Evolution in the Ross Sea (PIPERS) campaign deployed fourteen WIIOS units during the autumn sea-ice growth period in 2017, producing the largest single WII dataset to date — over 23,000 wave records, two orders of magnitude beyond SIPEX II.

Location: Ross Sea, Antarctica
Year: 2017
Season: Autumn ice growth
Instruments: 14 × WIIOS
Records: 23,000+ wave records

Where to get the data

The full dataset is published on Mendeley:

WII4 Sub-type B

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Placeholder for another WII4 variant.

WII5 Sub-type B

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Placeholder for another WII5 variant.

JARE-61 — East Antarctica 2019/20

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The 61st Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE-61) deployed additional WIIOS units on East Antarctic sea ice during the 2019/20 summer season. The summer deployment is notable for the WIIOS units surviving longer than in earlier campaigns despite being placed on seasonal (rather than multi-year) ice.

Location: East Antarctica
Year/Season: 2019/20 summer
Expedition: JARE-61 (Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition)
Instruments: WIIOS units

Where to get the data

The full dataset is published on Mendeley:

Buoy Types

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The WII project has gone through five major buoy generations. Earlier units were research prototypes; WII4 (Intel Edison-based) and WII5 (AVR/ESP32-based) have multiple production sub-types covering different deployment profiles.

WII1–WII3 — early research-prototype generations.
WII4 — Edison-era, with sub-types.
WII5 — current AVR/ESP32 generation, with sub-types.

Enclosures

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Enclosure designs for WII buoys, from the simplest ice-surface case through fully floating buoys built to survive Antarctic deployment. Choice of enclosure drives almost everything downstream — battery sizing, sensor mounting, what the antenna can see, and how the buoy behaves when the ice moves.

Design decisions

Ice survival

The enclosure has to live on or in sea ice for months. That means surviving freeze-in, freeze-thaw cycles, ice ridging, and the mechanical loads when floes collide. Critical points:

Publications

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Peer-reviewed publications produced from WII wave-buoy deployments and the underlying mathematics. Mirrors the bibliography on Alison Kohout’s project page — canonical list is hers; this page is a local pointer so the work shows up alongside the datasets.

Newest first.

2022

Brouwer J., Fraser A. D., Murphy D. J., Wongpan P., Alberello A., Kohout A. L., Horvat C., Witherspoon S., Massom R., Cartwright J., Williams G. D. Altimetric observations of wave attenuation through the Antarctic marginal ice zone using ICESat-2. The Cryosphere, 16, 2325–2353.

WII4

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The WII4 generation used the Intel Edison module as its main CPU, running Linux with a mix of C, shell, and Node code. Multiple sub-type variants were produced over its run.

Sub-type A — placeholder name; rename when the variant is identified.
Sub-type B — placeholder name; rename when the variant is identified.

WII5

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The WII5 generation is the current production design: AVR/ESP32 main board running the C++ control firmware, with multiple sub-type variants for different deployment profiles.

Sub-type A — placeholder name; rename when the variant is identified.
Sub-type B — placeholder name; rename when the variant is identified.

WII5 Site Launch and First Open-Source Release

Thu, 14 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

May 2026. This site goes live today, and with it the first open-source release of WII5 source material.

What’s public from launch:

Firmware — the AVR / ESP32 C++ control code that runs on every WII5 buoy, now mirrored at gitea.sh3d.com.au/Sh3d/WII5Firmware. The page carries code highlights and deep links into the repository.
Buoys catalog — every generation from WII1 through WII5, plus electronics, enclosures, test equipment, and the onboard data-processing host.
Data — pointer pages to the public Mendeley archives for SIPEX II, PIPERS, and JARE-61, plus the publications bibliography (including the 2014 Nature paper).
History — deployment-by-deployment log going back to the 2014 NIWA work that produced the seminal Nature result.

The rest of the WII repository family — earlier dashboards, servers, maths tooling, test rigs, data archives — is inventoried at Software → Other and is possibly available on request. None of it has been individually assessed for release yet (licensing, customer-specific identifiers, third-party dependencies all need looking at first). If something there sounds useful, ask and we’ll review it.

Korea Polar Research Institute 2024

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Eleven-buoy deployment with the Korea Polar Research Institute starting 1 March 2024 (project id kopri). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

TWK5 Canada 2019–2021

Sun, 01 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Two-buoy deployment in Canadian waters starting 1 December 2019 and running through 2021 (project id twk5). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

TAS 2019 to 2022

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Fourteen-buoy deployment running through Tasmanian waters from 1 July 2019 through 2022 (project id tas2019). One of the longest-running WII5 projects to date. Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

Melbourne University 2018

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Single-buoy deployment with the University of Melbourne starting 1 November 2018 (project id unimelb2018). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

Random Recovery

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Placeholder. Replace with the story behind the recovery — where it was found, by whom, and what state the buoy came back in.

Japan 2018

Mon, 26 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Three-buoy deployment in Japan starting 26 March 2018 (project id japan2018). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

NIWA 2017

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Fourteen-buoy deployment with NIWA (New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) starting 1 April 2017 (project id niwa2017).

This was the Intel Edison all-in-one Linux generation: the buoy ran everything — sensor capture, GPS, Iridium, scheduling — on a single Edison module running Linux. No AVR companion CPU. The Edison was chosen for its small form factor and reasonable power profile at the time; it later became the limiting factor (Intel discontinued the Edison line) and prompted the move back to AVR for WII5.

NYU UAE 2017

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Two-buoy deployment with NYU UAE (New York University Abu Dhabi) starting 1 April 2017 (project id nyuuae). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

Japan 2016

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Two-buoy deployment in Japan starting 9 September 2016 (project id japan2016). Details, ship, location, retrievals, and photos to follow.

NIWA Test 2016

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Internal NIWA test deployment (project id niwatest2016). Zero buoys recorded — appears to be a system test rather than a real deployment.

The dashboard records a deployment date of 13/05/2026, which looks like a placeholder default rather than a real date. Verify and correct when the deployment story is written up.

Internal Test Deployment

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Internal test deployment (project id test2016), two buoys. Not a real-world deployment — used for testing the server and dashboards.

The dashboard records a deployment date of 13/05/2026, which looks like a placeholder default rather than a real date.

Scott Base Testing 2014

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

NIWA-led field testing of the WII2 sensor board at Scott Base, Antarctica — November 2014. The trip exercised the second-generation buoy hardware end-to-end before any open-water deployment.

Hardware under test:

Sparton inclinometer for orientation
MPU9150 IMU (accelerometer / gyroscope / magnetometer)
Kistler high-precision accelerometer for wave motion
Venus GPS for position and timing
Iridium 9602 / 9522B SBD modems for telemetry
Sampling at 2–8 Hz to SD card, with periodic SBD transmission

The WII2 firmware tree that drove this trial is documented under Software → Other → WII2_Board. The campaign sat between WII1 (the original 2012 buoy) and the WII3 generation that followed.

NIWA 2012 — Original Deployment (Nature 2014)

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The seminal NIWA deployment: eight WII buoys sent into the Antarctic sea ice in 2012, collecting the first digital sea-ice wave-motion measurements ever made. The data they returned became the basis for the project’s headline publication two years later:

Kohout A. L., Williams M., Dean S., et al. (2014). Storm-induced sea-ice breakup and the implications for ice extent. Nature, 509, 604–607.