The Ocean Observatories Initiative

Abstract

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is an integrated suite of instrumented platforms and discrete instruments that measure physical, chemical, geological, and biological properties from the seafloor to the sea surface. The OOI provides data to address large-scale scientific challenges such as coastal ocean dynamics, climate and ecosystem health, the global carbon cycle, and linkages among seafloor volcanism and life. The OOI Cyberinfrastructure currently serves over 250 terabytes of data from the arrays. These data are freely available to users worldwide, changing the way scientists and the broader community interact with the ocean, and permitting ocean research and inquiry at scales of centimeters to kilometers and seconds to decades.

Spatial and temporal variation of ecosystem properties at macroscales

“…Such observations will be compiled in large and complex databases, and there is evidence that ecology is increasingly becoming more dataintensive, particularly compared to its historical roots (Hampton et al 2013;Peters et al 2014;Elliott et al 2016;Cheruvelil & Soranno 2018). There is an increasing availability of large publicly accessible data sets that include estimates of ecosystem materials and energy in a range of freshwater, marine and terrestrial systems across a range of spatial and temporal scales (O'Reilly et al 2015;Henson et al 2016;Anderson-Teixeira et al 2018;Smith et al 2018). In our study, we used a modelling approach that combines spatial and temporal observations in a single framework, which could be applied to most, if not all of the above databases to further explore the potentially complex relationships among spatial and temporal variation in ecosystem materials and energy.…”

Extreme Variability in Irminger Sea Winter Heat Loss Revealed by Ocean Observatories Initiative Mooring and the ERA5 Reanalysis

“…This situation has now changed radically with the deployment (at 60°N, 39°30 0 W) of the ocean observatories initiative (OOI) Irminger Sea surface flux reference site mooring. This mooring is the highest-latitude OOI surface flux site in either hemisphere (see Ogle et al, 2018 for results from the highest southern hemisphere OOI deployment at 54°S, 90°W) and has been deployed on five occasions from 2014 to 2018 (Smith et al, 2018). Data from the first four deployments are used here; under extreme conditions these yielded a combined total of nearly 2 years (21 months) of observations, including early winter in three successive years, that we present and analyze.…”

Better Regional Ocean Observing Through Cross-National Cooperation: A Case Study From the Northeast Pacific

“…The OOI Cabled Array consists of two legs heading offshore from Pacific City, Oregon (Figure 1). The Cable Array provides unprecedented power (10 kV, 8 kW) and bandwidth (10 Gigabit Ethernet), and two-way communication to scientific sensor arrays on the seafloor and throughout the water column (Kelley et al, 2016;Smith et al, 2018). One leg goes west for ∼500 km, spanning the Juan de Fuca Plate, to host a multi-platform, instrumented underwater laboratory at the base and summit of the Axial Seamount ( Figure 2F).…”