The U.S. National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative at Preliminary Design

Abstract

The U.S. National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) supports construction of an integrated network that will provide the oceanographic research and education communities with continuous, interactive access to the oceans. The program provides funding to build a permanent science- focused infrastructure that will enable ocean, atmospheric, and earth scientists to simultaneously study multiple phenomena in the oceans over time scales from milliseconds to decades, and over spatial scales from sub-meter to global, for an estimated operational lifetime of 25 years. With its global dimension and unifying cyberinfrastructure, the OOI is expected to catalyze new understanding of the oceans in a way that ship-based measurements and experiments, with their shorter observation window and inherent limitations of power and bandwidth, cannot. The OOI is coordinated for the National Science Foundation by Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI), a corporate consortium of more than 40 U.S. research and education institutions based in Washington, D.C. The JOI project office will accomplish design, engineering, installation, and testing and evaluation through multi-year contracts with three implementing organizations based at U.S. academic institutions. The investment in this envisioned infrastructure, which also includes an education and outreach component, is currently estimated by the National Science Foundation at USS330M.