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The ARIS Explorer 3000 sonar is a non-rotating multibeam sonar, operating at a frequency of 3 Mhz with 128 beams. The sonar covers 28 degrees horizontally and 14 degrees vertically, with the beams along the horizontal (in normal deployments). For more information, see the manufacturer's website: http://www.soundmetrics.com.The ARIS solfware ARIScope can be requested through the Sound Metrics website http://www.soundmetrics.com (go to the support page) or Contact us.
Revision History
- April 4th, 2017: Initial release
Data Product Options
None at this time.
Formats
The ARIS sonar outputs data at such a high rate and density that individual sonar images are not useful. Instead, most users will be interested in the MP4 videos made from the ARIS data. The videos use a frame rate equal to that of sonar, so the video duration should be the same duration as the duty cycle of the instrument. If the video is shorter that expected, it is likely that a few sonar image frames were dropped due to data transmission congestion (the sonar uses UDP transmission over Ethernet, so there is no guarantee of packet delivery). Raw data is handled by the Oceans 2.0 device driver, archived, then converted to manufacturer's format ARIS files. MAT files, which are generated from ARIS files, are available on-demand. MAT files are an intermediate product from which users can make plots or do analysis. MP4 video files, also generated from ARIS files, are archived and stored for fast retrieval, but will be generated on-the-fly if the post-processing and archiving is delayed.
Each sonar and video frame has an accurate time stamp from the ARIS sonar itself. This time is synchronized by the device driver every hour and included in all the data product formats (ARIS, MAT MP4). This frame time will be slightly different from the time in the file-names as that time is when the data was received at the shorestation, the difference being the normal latency over the network.
ARIS
These files are Sound Metric's custom format files for the ARIS sonar, used by the ARIScope software. Here's an example:
MAT
MAT files (v7) can be opened using Mathworks Matlab 7.0 or later. The file contains three structures, Meta, Data and Config.
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