OOI Science Plan: Exciting Opportunities using OOI Data
Objectives and Network Design: A Closer Look (2007), and was prepared by key personnel on the OOI Facilities Board (OOIFB) and in the OOI program, with contributions from scientists and educators using OOI data. It is intended to be a living document and will be updated at regular intervals or as major program changes occur.
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sources and signal cables. Progress in developing capabilities to collect long-term observations essential to ocean science has been hard won, at times slow, and in many cases remains insufficient. Unlike observational scientists on land, until OOI, ocean scientists did not have access to sustained high-resolution, multidisciplinary time series. They cannot routinely run sophisticated analyzers in situ or command event-driven sampling responses. While real-time data transmission capabilities are expanding, ocean scientists still cannot always access their in situ data in real- to near-real time because of power and telemetry constraints, requiring them to study events that, at best, occurred months previous. In some locations, such as high latitudes, scientists still lack the capability to deploy long-term moorings that collect data from the sea surface to the seafloor.
B. Project Background Biological, chemical, physical, and geological processes interact in the ocean, at the seafloor, and at the air-sea interface in complex ways, strongly influencing our quality of life (Fig. 1.1). Marine ecosystems are especially difficult to study and are largely unexplored, in part, because they operate far from routine human presence. The ocean system modulates climate, produces major energy and raw-material resources, supports the largest biosphere on Earth, absorbs greenhouse gases, produces as much as half of the oxygen we breathe, significantly influences rainfall and temperature patterns on land, and fuels devastating coastal storm events, such as hurricanes. The heat capacity of the top 2.5 meters of the ocean is equivalent to the heat capacity of the entire Earth’s atmosphere. The ocean is nearly 4.5 billion years old and has been continuously driven by solar energy and internal thermal energy, absorbing and redistributing heat and chemicals from both above and below, throughout its history. At some point in its history, probably between 4.0 and 3.8 billion years ago, life emerged in the ocean and the complexity increased dramatically. Ship-based expeditionary research and satellite imagery contribute enormously to our knowledge of the ocean, but the spatial and temporal limitations imposed by these methods mean that many critical ocean phenomena remain unexplored.
The OOI is meeting these challenges through its deployed network of instrumented platforms and discrete sensors that collect ocean and seafloor data at high sampling rates over years to decades. These sensors are linked to shore using the latest communications technologies, enabling scientists to use incoming data in real- to near-real time in models. Scientists and educators from around the country, from large and small institutions, and from fields other than ocean science, are taking advantage of OOI’s open data policy and emerging cyberinfrastructure capabilities in distributed processing, visualization, and integrative modeling. Although the OOI infrastructure will not populate all oceans, nor answer all pressing ocean science questions, this investment is and will continue to catalyze ocean science research for decades to come. The ability to provide sufficient power continuously to complex instrumentation, to retrieve data with minimal delay, and to interact with instruments and platform sampling strategies in real- to near-real time will continue to stimulate the development of more sensors, durable hardware, autonomous vehicles, accurate ocean models, and other observing capabilities. Increased temporal and spatial coverage of ocean sampling, the growth of technical capability, development
The ocean is a challenging environment for collecting data. It is opaque to radio frequencies, it is corrosive, it exerts tremendous pressure at depth, and it harbors marine life that fouls sensor surfaces. The ocean’s strong storms can destroy mechanical structures. Most of its volume is not readily accessible and is far from shore-based power
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