Cabled ocean observatories in Sea of Oman and Arabian Sea

Abstract

An ocean observatory—consisting of a real‐time, cabled array in the Sea of Oman and an internally recording, autonomous mooring array recently upgraded to a cabled array in the northern Arabian Sea—celebrated more than 2500 days of continuous operation in July 2012. The observatory, which measures a range of properties, such as water current velocities, temperature, salinity, pressure, dissolved oxygen, and turbidity, is part of the Lighthouse Ocean Research Initiative (LORI) project [du Vall et al., 2011], which was designed as a pilot project and installed in 2005 in the region off Abu Bakara (Figures 1a and 1b). The initial goal of the project was to prove that an in situ, cabled ocean observatory can return high‐quality scientific data on a real‐time basis over longer time periods than conventional moored systems. That same year, an autonomous array was deployed off Ras al Hadd and on Murray Ridge in the Arabian Sea (Figure 1a).