Program Update – November 2012

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) this month prepares for the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting in December with a variety of sessions, posters and information sharing opportunities throughout the conference.

The AGU Fall Meeting is the largest worldwide conference in the geophysical sciences, attracting more than 20,000 Earth and space scientists, educators, students and policy makers. AGU will take place from Dec. 3-7 in San Francisco. For more information visit the AGU Fall Meeting 2012 Website.

In addition to scheduled scientific sessions, the OOI Team will hold an informal meeting to provide interested attendees an update of recent OOI activities followed by a deployment schedule Q&A session.  The informal meeting will be offered from 6:00 PM -7:00 PM on Wednesday, Dec. 5, in the Orpheum Room at the Serrano Hotel.

Several talks and posters by the OOI at the 2012 AGU meeting discuss the logistics of delivering data to the user community.  Broadly, posters and talks will focus on the OOI cyberinfrastructure delivering data to users on the internet, software developed by the OOI Education and Public Engagement (EPE) to bring these data into the classroom, and strategies for shipboard education from the OOI Regional Scale Nodes (RSN).

Click here for a list of talks and posters that the OOI will be presenting at AGU.

Additionally, progress continues toward the testing of equipment in preparation for deployment. The OOI RSN team, after successfully deploying primary nodes over the summer, has now completed interface testing of the low-power junction boxes, one of the three types of secondary nodes.

The three instruments connected during the testing were: a Vertical Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (VADCP), a Conductivity-Temperature-Depth (CTD) instrument, and a pressure sensor. The goal was early identification, before full production begins, of any communications or power interface issues between the junction box and the scientific instruments.

Next step is for the junction box to go through formal First Article testing. In spring 2013, it will be integrated on its deployment frame with all attached instruments and will go through final integration testing in preparation for deployment in summer 2013.

For more information on the OOI please visit the OOI Website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.