Tethered Profiler

A tethered profiler is an instrument package that climbs up and down a fixed mooring line to return repeated high-resolution vertical profiles from one location. A motorized crawler grips the mooring wire and drives a CTD and auxiliary sensors through a set depth band on a programmed schedule; the McLane Moored Profiler is the common example. The approach delivers the dense time-and-depth coverage of repeated profiling without the ship time of station work, resolving internal waves, mixed-layer evolution, and frontal structure. It complements fixed-depth instruments on the same mooring, which sample continuously but only at their clamp depths.