The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) Wind Partnerships for Advanced Component Technologies (WindPACT) project sought to advance wind turbine technology by exploring innovative concepts in drivetrain design. A team led by Northern Power Systems (Northern) of Waitsfield, Vermont, was chosen to perform this work under subcontract YCX-1-30209-02. The team set project objectives to identify, design, and test a megawatt (MW)-scale drivetrain with the lowest overall life-cycle cost. The project comprised three phases: Preliminary study of alternative drivetrain designs (Phase I) Detailed design development (Phase II) Proof of concept fabrication and test (Phase III). This report summarizes the results of all three phases of this project. Participants The WindPACT project was conducted under directive from NREL, with active participation from personnel at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) at Golden, Colorado. Northern Power Systems, the prime subcontractor, assembled a highly experienced team for the WindPACT project. The following table identifies team members (in bold) and contributing consultants, along with their major roles.

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The travel-time effects of a sea ice cover on an acoustic pulse are estimated using generalized ray theory. This expands upon the previous work done by Jin and Wadhams [Prog. Oceanogr. 22, 249–275 (1989)] by including the effects of frequency dispersion and different sets of ice parameters. Travel-time changes due to single reflections are approximated by plane wave reflection theory, and compared to the generalized ray theory results. Statistical effects for multiple reflections, such as the ice thickness probability distribution function, Fresnel zone averaging, and shadowing are considered. Finally, the effects of ice-induced travel-time changes on tomographic inversions for water column oceanography are considered. The implications of this work on the 1988–89 Greenland Sea tomography experiment are considered in detail.

New challenges in the area of experimental logistics, data visualization and data fusion are encountered in oceanographic research when the need to keep track of the location of multiple ships, moorings, gliders, drifters, and other platforms is combined with assimilating supporting data gathered off the Internet and inserted into the experimental framework. Showing that this can be done well is a start towards our being able to think of scientific expeditions on research vessels as deployable ocean observatories.Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution recently collaborated with the Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observing Lab (COOL) and other members of the Shallow Water '06 experiment (sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research) in the creation of a new software tool called ExView. This Experiment Viewer software is a web-based application that runs on ships and on shore. It enables coordinated, real-time collaboration between researchers employing a number of different research platforms involved in a large-scale experiment. During the SW06 experiment, logistics information and scientific reports associated with twenty-five Principal Investigators, six ships, eight gliders, three REMUS class AUVs, sixty-two moorings, two aircraft, and four drifting moorings were all made available to researchers in near-real-time over a three month time-period during the summer of 2006.A primarily wireless communications network comprising of HiSeasNet (satellite), SWAP (shipboard WiFi), SeaNet (INMARSAT-B), and the Global Internet was used to synchronize websites (5 on ships, 1 on shore) so that all participants of the experiment could contribute and monitor platform locations, ship tracks, glider tracks, aircraft tracks, daily reports, weather information, CODAR imagery, satellite imagery, and ocean model results.A dynamic website was mirrored between all of the ships involved in the SW06 experiment. A map at the center of the web Manuscript