NSF + COL = OOI (Ocean Observatories Initiative)

Once again the National Science Foundation is putting its hand into another effort to build scientific cyberinfrastructure, this time turning its attention to what lies under the sea. On Monday it was announced in a press release at the NSF website that the NSF and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership (COL) signed a cooperative agreement to build and operate the Ocean Observatories Initiative, which aims to “provide a network of undersea sensors” to observe the ocean and collect data like never before. From this article, it sounds like the NSF and the COL want to do for the seas something similar to what the National Virtual Observatory does for the sky.

This network of hundreds of sensors will be placed at several coastal, open-ocean, and seafloor locations, and will continuously collect data about “complex ocean processes” such as climate variability, ocean circulation, and ocean acidification. The Ocean Observatories Initiative looks to up the ante in data collection in terms of both rate and scale. And with this data, scientists studying the oceans hope to gain more of an understanding about how the oceans affect and interact with the earth and atmosphere.

This underwater initiative looks to take five or more years. The initial phase is the major construction phase, which includes “production engineering and prototyping of key coastal and open-ocean components (moorings, buoys, sensors), award of the primary seafloor cable contract, completion of a shore station for power and data, and software development for sensor interfaces to the network.” According to the article, the OOI should begin to see data flow by 2013, and the full system is projected to be up and running by 2015.

This is yet another effort that pours money into tools and technology to generate data, but the press release does not say much about what will be done with the data once it is collected. The article does say that the continuous data flow collected by the ocean sensors will be “integrated by a sophisticated computing network, and will be openly available to scientists, policy makers, students and the public.” Though the article fails to mention how exactly this will be made possible; I’m assuming that is because the project is still heavily in a development phase.

The OOI is a complex project, involving lots of cooperation from many different institutions, including Oregon State University, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the University of Washington, and University of California at San Diego (who is in charge of implementing the cyberinfrastructure component... though again the details are somewhat lacking).

So yet again the NSF is at the forefront of attempting to develop cyberinfrastructure, and once again a scientific field looks to be on the edge of a breakthrough when it comes to research and technology. It will be several years before we will start to really see the results of these efforts, and whether or not this project will be a success along the lines of the Virtual Observatory or another failed or incomplete attempt as we have encountered before in our readings. It sounds pretty exciting though, so I hope it works out.