The SERDP & ESTCP Symposium is just a few weeks away and the Munitions Response (MR) program area is excited to announce the two technical sessions they are offering this year. These sessions will highlight MR projects advancing the development and demonstration of innovative technologies that detect, characterize, and remediate military munitions in underwater sites.

The first technical session, “Underwater UXO - Classification and Detection,” will provide overviews of SERDP & ESTCP researchers that are developing sensors and systems to find and identify unexploded and discarded munitions underwater. Presenters in this session will describe several sensor modalities that can detect and discriminate underwater munitions both proud of the seafloor and buried in the sediment. Both experimental measurements using acoustic and electromagnetic sensors and modeling of the resulting data will be presented. This session will take place on Wednesday, December 4^th from 8:30 to 11:45 AM.

The second technical session, “Underwater UXO: Environmental Characterization for Burial and Mobility Modeling,” delves into how many active and former military installations have ranges and training areas with UXO contamination that include water environments such as rivers, estuaries, and coastal ocean areas. Storm waves or currents can cause underwater munitions to become unburied and move into new, potentially dangerous locations. SERDP researchers have conducted experimental studies to characterize the sediments, simulate and track how these energetic events can cover, uncover, and move unexploded ordnance, and model this movement. This session highlights experimental and modeling efforts focused on an engineering model of munitions mobility and it will take place on Wednesday, December 4^th from 1:45 to 5:00 PM.

MR is looking forward to seeing everyone at the symposium in early December. Don’t forget to register on the symposium website!