NSF-OOI Regional Cabled Array: Current infrastructure, operations, and data delivery

The Regional Cabled Array (RCA) is a component of the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (NSF-OOI) and spans sites across the southern half of the Juan de Fuca Plate in the Northeast Pacific. The combination of 900 kilometers of submarine telecommunications cable and seven primary nodes, with eight kilowatts of power and 10 gigabit ethernet (GbE) bandwidth of communications, provides real-time access and control of platforms/instruments at study locations extending from the Oregon Offshore/ Shelf areas more than 400 kilometers westward to Axial Volcano. Secondary infrastructure consists of both water-column and seafloor platforms/instruments that provide synoptic measurements of physical, chemical, geological, and biological processes associated with shelf-slope hydrodynamics, tectonic plate subduction, and submarine volcanism. A synopsis of current infrastructure and data types will highlight some of the novel platforms and sensors and their maintenance, as well as general lessons learned during recovery and redeployment operations. A brief summary of cabled data flow and current cyberinfrastructure will also touch upon some of the challenges for data quality assurance and the processing and delivery of disparate and/or large volume dataset.

Speaker: Orest E. Kawka, Univ. of Washington