The cabled ocean observatory system is a seabed oceanographic observatory connecting a shore station to an undersea node with power and data-transfer capabilities. This node allow us to create a net of sensors providing data from the bottom to the upper layer of the water column. Thus, scientists have the possibility to deploy, recover and redeploy the registered sensors in order to receive insitu observations in near real time for long with the maximum possible sample size.
The cabled ocean observatory was installed on the seafloor 1650 m off the coast of Pylos. This node is connected to the land with a fiber-optic cable 15 km length in an appropriately designed station at Methoni, Messenia in order to collect, power supply and transfer data from the registered sensors to the data center. Registered sensors provide data for conductivity, sea temperature, sea level, surface waves (detection of tsunami), chlorophyll-a, dissolved oxygen, dissolved CO2, turbidity, acidity pH, velocities and directions of benthonic currents on a water column300 m from the bottom, hydrophone of environmental sound (Ambient noise with emphasis on the marine mammals acoustic/bioacoustics) sensitivity -190 dB for 1Volt/μPascal in frequency range 10 – 200000 Hz, seismic activity. Collected data are transferred from the cabled observatory through a fiber optic telecommunications cable to the data center of HCMR.
The important role of the cabled ocean observatory lies in the use of data from a wide range of users not only from the scientific community but also from the industry. In particular, provided data are used to understand physical processes, to detect a signal of physical phenomena (earthquakes, tsunami) and to warn the population at risk in a timely.
The deployment of the cabled observatory was in the framework of the European infrastructure EMSO-ERIC and the national research infrastructure HIMIOFoTs.
Detailed information of the EMSO community (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory) is available at the following link: http://emso.eu