Data quality from multibeam echosounders can vary dramatically across the US academic fleet for a number of reasons including undetected hardware failures, suboptimal configurations or even misguided acquisition practices. The net result for the primary users of these systems, the scientific community, is a high level of uncertainty when undertaking mapping expeditions with the worst case scenario being the discovery that a system is non-functional on the first day of the cruise.

A 2010 NSF meeting was held to address these problems with one major outcome of the meeting being the recommendation to form a group of system experts to aid in assessment and improvement of multibeam systems across the fleet. The University of New Hampshire's Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping teamed with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and submitted a successfully funded joint NSF proposal to form such a team in 2011.

In this talk, we will discuss some of the strategies we've taken thus far including ship system assessment procedures, documentation and dissemination of best practices and deployment of software tools to aid in these regards.