HOMER represents a novel range of technology to aid continuous monitoring of water column parameters with depth. Being a seabed mounted instrument it combines flexibility in measuring package with long deployement times and enables to monitor temporal variations in water characteristics that are crucial to understand issues such as climate change.

HOMER is a seabed mounted profiling instrument designed to monitor hydrographic properties of the marine environment, currently enabling continuous measurement of temperature and salinity with depth. The essential part of HOMER consists of a buoyant capsule tethered to a fine monofilament line which is used to winch the capsule up and down through the water column. The capsule, containing conductivity, temperature and depth (CTD) sensors, is repeatedly released and retrieved through the water column, enabling continuous profiling of water column parameters.

The development of HOMER overcomes current problems with shipborne measurements, which are inherently infrequent and  often difficult to obtain in certain periods of the year. HOMER has a number of important advantages compared to available mooring instruments,  being less susceptible to fishing risk while deployed,allowing modification of the current design to include more complex measuring packages and being less labour intensive during deployement.

HOMER development has now finalized its development stage , which was supported by the EU and NERC funding. The testing phase, showed the robustness of HOMER in multiple coastal zone deployements as well as in a deep sea setting. Currently, HOMER is in a stage of pre-commercialization, which is funded by NERC-SBRI and AIE.