UCSD Selected to Design, Build Cyber Infrastructure for Ocean Observatories

Sea Technology, Jun 2007

What people know about the world's oceans comes largely from ship-based scientists taking samples and making measurements at periodic intervals. Now, researchers led by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), will create a blueprint for digital infrastructure that will allow ocean observatories to collect, process and transmit data 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Washington, D.C.-based Joint Oceanographic Institutions Inc. (JOI) has selected UCSD to design and construct information technology and networking for the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The initial $29 million cyber infrastructure (CI) award is for six years, and total funding may reach more than $42 million over the course of the planned 11-year project.

The UCSD division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology will manage the project and, together with Scripps and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, will build the CI.

"Routine, long-term measurement of episodic oceanic processes is crucial to continued growth in our understanding and predictive modeling of complex natural phenomena that are highly variable and span enormous scales in space and time," said John Orcutt, principal investigator on the OOI CI project and professor of geophysics at Scripps, UCSD.

The CI will transport real-time data streams at up to one gigabit per second from a variety of ocean-dwelling sensors and other instruments.

The data will be available in real time via dedicated, high-speed Internet links to every researcher, teacher or citizen. Two-way connectivity will also allow scientists to operate robots on the ocean floor interactively-from the relative comfort of their campus laboratories. Many of these functions will be undertaken automatically without human intervention.

"Innovative ocean observatory facilities will provide unprecedented levels of power and communication to access and manipulate real-time sensor networks deployed within the ocean," said Steve Bohlen, president of JOI.