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A sailor and a man on shore, both sounding the depth with a line. Depth sounding, often simply called sounding, is measuring the depth of a body of water. Data taken from soundings are used in bathymetry to make maps of the floor of a body of water, such as the seabed topography. Soundings were traditionally shown on nautical charts in fathoms ...
The word sounding is used for all types of depth measurements, including those that don't use sound, and is unrelated in origin to the word sound in the sense of noise or tones. Echo sounding is a more rapid method of measuring depth than the previous technique of lowering a sounding line until it touched bottom.
The earliest and most widespread use of sound and sonar technology to study the properties of the sea is the use of a rainbow echo sounder to measure water depth. Sounders were the devices used that mapped the many miles of the Santa Barbara Harbor ocean floor until 1993. Fathometers measure the depth of the waters. It works by electronically ...
Originally, bathymetry involved the measurement of ocean depth through depth sounding. Early techniques used pre-measured heavy rope or cable lowered over a ship's side. [9] This technique measures the depth only a singular point at a time, and is therefore inefficient.
Sonar (sound navigation and ranging or sonic navigation and ranging) [2] is a technique that uses sound propagation (usually underwater, as in submarine navigation) to navigate, measure distances , communicate with or detect objects on or under the surface of the water, such as other vessels.
In nautical terms, the word sound is used to describe the process of determining the depth of water in a tank or under a ship. Tanks are sounded to determine if they are full (for cargo tanks) or empty (to determine if a ship has been holed) and for other reasons.
A multibeam echosounder is a device typically used by hydrographic surveyors to determine the depth of water and the nature of the seabed. Most modern systems work by transmitting a broad acoustic fan shaped pulse from a specially designed transducer across the full swathe acrosstrack with a narrow alongtrack then forming multiple receive beams (beamforming) that are much narrower in the ...
Fishfinders were derived from fathometers, active sonar instruments used for navigation and safety to determine the depth of water. [1] The fathom is a unit of water depth, from which the instrument gets its name. The fathometer is an echo sounding system for measurement of water depth. A fathometer will display water depth and can make an ...