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August 24 2007
IGPP plays crucial role in Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) award
The Joint Oceanographic Institutions (JOI) has awarded a $97.7 million contract to an academic partnership led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), to support the development, installation and initial operation of the coastal and global components of the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). The WHOI partnership includes Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. This award completes the management team to construct and implement the $331.5 million OOI Network.
At Scripps, the project will be managed through the Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Institute of Geophysics & Planetary Physics. Dr. Bob Weller at WHOI (a Scripps graduate) is the overall PI for the project. Carolyn Keen is the Deputy Project Manager, John Orcutt is one of three institutional members of the Leadership Team, Uwe Send is one of three Project Scientists, Jon Berger is the Systems Engineer for large buoys, and Peter Worcester for the ALOHA acoustic source. In addition, Uwe Send will be building water column profiling systems for the global installations while Russ Davis and Dan Rudnick will be providing gliders to expand upon the fixed OOI locations in the ocean. Frank Vernon will be working on the seafloor junction box needed for many of these installations. The OOI Cyberinfrastructure Implementing Organization, funded earlier, will work with this IO in integrating the needed information technology. John Orcutt is the PI for the Cyberinfrastructure IO while Frank Vernon is the Project Director and Matt Arrott the Program Manger. We partnered with the French firm Technip in designing the Extended Depth Platform (EDP); the company will provide funding for construction this coming year. In addition we've partnered with SAIC in spar buoy and junction box design.
Diagram of the Extended Depth Platform (EDP) being developed, tested and installed by Scripps/IGPP and Technip.
Click on the image for a high resolution version (6.9MB).
"This initiative is a major investment that will transform our understanding of the ocean," said JOI President Steven Bohlen. "It will contribute to tremendous advances in our understanding of how Earth works."
The OOI Network spans global, regional and coastal scales, linked by a system-wide cyberinfrastructure. The award establishes WHOI and its partners from Scripps and OSU as the implementing organization for the coastal and global components of the OOI Network. Each partner will contribute scientific and engineering expertise to the development of a range of innovative moored buoys, cabled nodes, and autonomous vehicles that will provide users with data in real-time or near-real-time, and allow users to remotely control their instruments and construct virtual observatories specifically tailored to their scientific needs.
[ excerpted from JOI press release ]
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