Program Update: Ocean Observatories Initiative – October 2012
The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) this month attended the MTS/IEEE Oceans ’12 Conference in Virginia Beach, Virginia as part of a larger Consortium for Ocean Leadership presence. OOI scientists were represented at the conference in a special session hosted by the Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) program – “IGNITE the Crowd.” This was a fast-paced session of five minute talks by ten dynamic leaders in the ocean observing field. These leaders included two of OOI’s own scientists – Scott Glenn and Mike Crowley from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. A large focus of both talks was the importance of observational data not just for scientific discovery and understanding, but also for enhancing the education of the next generation of scientists. Glenn and Crowley are both a part of the OOI Education and Public Engagement (EPE) team, which focuses on building tools to simplify the large stream of OOI observational data into a more integrated package that can be used for educational purposes.
OOI was also discussed in a recently published peer reviewed journal article by Gawarkiewicz, et al. titled “Direct interaction between the Gulf Stream and the shelfbreak south of New England” in the August 2012 issue of Scientific Reports. At a meeting with New England commercial fishermen last December, physical oceanographers Glen Gawarkiewicz and Al Plueddemann from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were alerted by three fishermen about unusually high surface water temperatures and strong currents on the outer continental shelf south of New England. The result of this investigation was a discovery that the Gulf Stream diverged well to the north of its normal path beginning in late October 2011, causing the warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures along the New England continental shelf. A portion of the data used in this study came from instruments on temporary test moorings placed 12 km south of the shelfbreak by the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI).
Also this month, the OOI released a Request for Proposals (RFP) for Fuel Cells to be used on the Coastal Global Scale Nodes (CGSN). Click here to read more about the RFP.
New on the OOI website this month is a photo tour of the Primary Node Installation. The installation of the primary nodes for the cabled component of the OOI Infrastructure in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, completed in August 2012, was a significant construction milestone for the OOI program. Click here to visit the photo tour.
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