Florida Tech's Marine Services

Florida Tech's Division of Marine and Environmental Systems (DMES) has pioneered in the application of advanced concepts in coastal and estuarine engineering such as numerical modeling of circulation and sediment transport, beach profile evolution, tidal-inlet hydrodynamics, and estuarine circulation.  Using these techniques DMES conducts both basic and applied studies of coastal and estuarine processes.  DMES has the capability of conducting long-term  hindcasts of wave climate in the coastal ocean and forecasts of  wave spectra in  the coastal ocean.

DMES field survey capabilities and experience spans a full range including beach topography and shoreface bathymetry, measurements of tides, currents, waves, water quality, and meteorology, as well as sediment sampling and coring, seismic stratigraphy. Surveys can be conducted from a number of vessels maintained by FIT designed specifically for coastal waters. Computer assisted data acquisition allows rapid reduction of field data and reduces turn around time between field surveys and final product.

Resources at DMES are available for a wide range of field and analytical activities. Computing capabilities are built around a workstation network that is equipped with state of the art software for coastal engineering and science. The DMES Coastal Processes Group maintains well-equipped  sedimentologic and coastal engineering laboratories, which are used for a variety of tasks including sediment grain-size analysis, core descriptions, mineralogy and wave tank experiments. Florida Tech Marine operations maintains a fleet of ocean-going and estuarine vessels designed for handling and deploying a wide range of oceanographic sampling  equipment. Electronic sampling gear such as side scan and sub-bottom profilers are deployed from the R/V Delphinus, which can remain at sea for up to 21 days for long-term surveys.

DMES maintains a fully equipped GIS and remote sensing laboratory. Laboratory systems include the ARC/INFO GIS and a data base management system coupled with large format digitizing and plotting capabilities. Remote sensing is based on the ERDAS image analysis system, which includes image processing and GIS capabilities. GIS and remote sensing systems are compatible with systems used at the county and state levels and contain the flexibility to transfer data into a variety of other GIS formats.