The Ocean Observatories Initiative: Unprecedented access to real-time data streaming from the Cabled Array through OOI Cyberinfrastructure

The National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), is a broad-scale, multidisciplinary facility that will transform oceanographic research by providing users with unprecedented access to long-term datasets from a variety of deployed physical, chemical, biological, and geological sensors. The Cabled Array component of the OOI, installed and operated by the University of Washington, is located on the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate off the coast of Oregon. It is a unique network of >100 cabled instruments and instrumented moorings transmitting data to shore in real-time via fiber optic technology. Instruments now installed include HD video and digital still cameras, mass spectrometers, a resistivity-temperature probe inside the orifice of a high-temperature hydrothermal vent, upward-looking ADCP’s, pH and pC02 sensors, Horizontal Electrometer Pressure Inverted Echosounders and many others. Here, we present the technical aspects of data streaming from the Cabled Array through the OOI Cyberinfrastructure. We illustrate the types of instruments and data products available, data volume and density, processing levels and algorithms used, data delivery methods, file formats and access methods through the graphical user interface. Our goal is to facilitate the use and access to these unprecedented, co-registered oceanographic datasets. We encourage researchers to collaborate through the use of these simultaneous, interdisciplinary measurements, in the exploration of short-lived events (tectonic, volcanic, biological, severe storms), as well as long-term trends in ocean systems (circulation patterns, climate change, ocean acidity, ecosystem shifts).