Abstract
Over fifteen years ago, Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) began with the world’s first large-scale, interactive, real-time portal into the ocean, bringing continuous, real-time data to the surface for applications in scientific research, societal benefits, and supporting Canada’s ocean industry. This marked the dawn of the Internet-connected ocean, enabling a more fulsome understanding of the ocean through ocean intelligence. These open data have improved our ability to monitor and understand our changing ocean offshore all three coasts of Canada, thanks to diversity of sensor systems to monitor earthquakes and tsunamis, deep sea biodiversity, whales, hydrothermal vents, neutrinos, ocean noise, ocean acidification, forensics experiments, and the impact of climate change, including sea ice thinning in the Arctic. This pioneering approach began in the late 1990s, when scientists began developing a new way of doing ocean science that was no longer limited by weather and ship-time. They imagined a permanent presence in the ocean of sensors to allow a continuous flow of ocean data via the Internet. This big science began to take shape early this century, when a partnership between United States and Canadian institutions was established. ONC evolved out of this international collaboration with seed funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, while in the United States, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) was funded. ONC works closely with OOI on that span the countries’ west coast border. Recently similar observing initiatives in Europe have begun, led by EMSO, which now has a close collaboration with ONC as an Associate Member.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONOcean Networks Canada’s infrastructure includes large telecommunication cabled networks (NEPTUNE and VENUS; Figure 1), community-based networks along all three of Canada’s ocean coasts, mobile systems on ferries, and land-based sensors that support coastal radar, weather stations, ship traffic, earthquake early warning, and tagged marine bird detection
Ocean Networks Canada’s infrastructure includes large telecommunication cabled networks (NEPTUNE and VENUS; Figure 1), community-based networks along all three of Canada’s ocean coasts, mobile systems on ferries, and land-based sensors that support coastal radar, weather stations, ship traffic, earthquake early warning, and tagged marine bird detection.The cabled observatories are a node-based networks that follow the topology of the Internet protocol and supplies the power and communication capabilities required for data capture and real-time control of sensors, cameras, samplers, electro-mechanical profilers, and a seafloor crawler
Ocean Networks Canada operates over 9,000 deep sea, coastal and land-based sensors on all three of Canada’s coasts, 24/7/365
Summary
Ocean Networks Canada’s infrastructure includes large telecommunication cabled networks (NEPTUNE and VENUS; Figure 1), community-based networks along all three of Canada’s ocean coasts, mobile systems on ferries, and land-based sensors that support coastal radar, weather stations, ship traffic, earthquake early warning, and tagged marine bird detection. 280 gigabytes of data are added to a rich and diverse petabyte-scale archive, most openly available on ONC’s Oceans 3.0 data portal. These FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) open data enable over 20,000 users around the world to build and make use of ocean intelligence. Ocean Networks Canada’s data are a decade or more in length and represent a globally unique resource These highresolution time series permit researchers to investigate the dynamics of ocean processes across time-scales from hours, days, and seasons, to inter-annual and decadal scales. The research highlights described here would not have been possible without the cabled technology because it provides enough power for the use of camera lights and robots, temporal resolutions that resolve high frequency processes, long and continuous time series for discovery of trends, and high resolution monitoring over a wide area range to capture processes, e.g., from the shelf to the deep sea
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