Latest developments in building the world's first regional cabled observatory: NEPTUNE Canada

摘要

NEPTUNE Canada (NC: www.neptullecanada,ca) plans to complete installation of the world's first regional cabled ocean observatory in late 2009 off Canada's west coast. It will comprise five main observatory nodes (100m-2700m water depths), an 800km backbone cable delivering 10kV DC power and 10Gbps communicaions bandwidth to hundreds of sensors, with a design life of 25 years. Infrastructure funding (S1OOM) and initial operational funding (S20M) have been secured. NC's wet plato design, manufacture and installation was contracted to Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Netwvorks; junction boxes were designed and built by OceanWorks. UVic leads a consortium of 12 Canadian universities, and hosts the coastal VENUS cabled observatory with Ocean Netwerks Canada providing management oversight. Experiments will focus on: earthquake dynamics and tsunami hazards; fluid fluxes in both ocean crust and sediments, including gas hydrates; ocean/climate dynamics, including acidification and nutrient fluxes; deep-sea ecosystems dynamics; and engineering and computer science research. The Data Management and Archiving System (DMAS) is, being developed with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). using Web services to expose the functionality of DMAS various components. The Web 2.0 envitonment will include social networking aspects within an Oceans 2.0 environment. A network backhaul link from Port Albemi shore station to UVic,s data centre provides a dedicated 10Gbps/10yr. service.