6.6.3 Meeting the Needs of Hydrographic Surveying: A Case Study of the Requirements Development Process

A long-standing challenge in oceanography and hydrographic surveying is accurate real-time measurement of offshore water levels. The advent of recent techniques and technologies has afforded an opportunity to address this challenge. This paper will discuss the requirement development process as it related to specifying requirements for GPS-tracked buoy for hydrographic survey applications at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). How stakeholders from a variety of technical disciplines collaborated to develop requirements to meet and solve an important operational need via a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant will be explored.