ION Minutes
AGU Breakfast Meeting
December 15, 2010, 7:00-8:00AM,
Walnut Room, San Francisco
Marriott
Attendees:
Stephen
(Chairman)
Best
Cannat
Heeseman
Howe
Kaneda-san
Montagner
Romanowicz
Schultz
Tsuboi-san
1) The minutes of the 2009 AGU Breakfast Meeting
were accepted.
2) Review of ION activities in 2010 -
Stephen
a) A special session was held at the 2010
Spring EGU (in Vienna), "Towards establishing permanent infrastructures
for ocean observations: instrumentation, measurement strategies and methods for
ocean observatories".
Convener: Chris
Waldmann, Co-conveners: I. Puillat-Felix, L. Beranzoli, R.A.
Stephen
3) Reports from Members
a) Best/Heesemann - Neptune Canada (Appendix A)
b) Kaneda-san/Tsuboi-san - JAMSTEC/IFREE
(Appendix B)
c) Montagner/Cannat - EMSO/ESONET
Status of the ESONET-EMSO
project.
ESONET NoE is a European project (Network of
Excellence) that has been funded for 4 years (finishing in February 2011) to
organize the deep sea observatory community in Europe and prepare a workable
science and technology plan for a network of European deep sea observatories.
It is coordinated by IFREMER and is currently holding its last meeting in
Marseille. EMSO PP is another European funded project (Preparatory Phase
project), aimed at defining the implementation-business plan for the European
deep sea observatories network. EMSO has national membership. For France, this
membership is represented by IFREMER, and national EMSO-related activities are
coordinated by a joined IFREMER-CNRS committee. EMSO PP will still run for 2
years and it is expected that by that time a critical number of countries will
have committed to funding of the project so that the actual ESONET-EMSO
infrastructure and legal managing entity will have been created.
Update on some current
ESONET-EMSO monitoring activities.
Real time (cabled), near real time
("standalone" buoyed systems, or autonomous monitoring is
currently going on at many of the 11 ESONET-EMSO nodes. Not having attended the
Marseille meeting I am up to date on only 2 of the recent real time or near
real time experiments: one at the Azores node, with acoustic connection to a
light buoy and a set of sensors including short period seismometer and pressure
gauge (Figure 1), video camera, and environmental parameters sensors; and the
other at the Ligurian node, with cabled connection via the ANTARES cable
(ANTARES is a cabled neutrino detector), with a broadband seismometer and
pressure gauge (Figure 2), and physical oceanography and biology sensor
packages.
Figure 1: Short period seismometer and pressure
gauge at the Azores ESONET-EMSO node. In the background you can see the
junction box that provides acoustic connection to the buoy that then connects
to shore via satellite.
Figure 2: Cabled broadband seismometer and
pressure gauge at the Ligurian ESONET-EMSO node.
d) Romanowicz - MARS/MOBB
MARS
(Monterey Accelerated Research System) is a cabled observatory in Monterey Bay.
The MOBB (Monterey Ocean-bottom Broadband) seismometer has been acquiring data autonomously
since April 2002 and via cable since February 2009. In February 2010 the system suffered
damage from trawlers and is under repair.
More detail is available on the MBARI web site.
e) Schultz - US Cascadia Initiative
The Cascadia Initiative is a $10M ARRA project
to build an onshore/offshore network of seismic and geodetic stations from Cape
Mendocino in California to Cape Flattery in Washington. The network, which will
run for several years, is targeted at understanding the structure and processes
of this subduction margin, which has a history of large earthquakes every
300-500 years. The Cascadia Initiative is a community experiment: the data will
be made freely available as quickly as possible.
Half of the funds were allocated to build 60
ocean-bottom seismometers. These instruments, which are being built by the
three OBSIP IICs (SIO, WHOI and LDEO), will have Trillium Compact seismometers
and pressure gauges. A subset of the instruments will be trawl-resistant and
will be deployed on the continental shelf.
The first OBS deployments are being scheduled
for early summer 2011.
Also a workshop on"Experiments with
Portable Ocean Bottom Seismographs (EPOBS)" was held in September 2010 at
Snowbird, Utah. The goals included
identifying scientific opportunities, requirements, new technologies, and
strategies for experiments that use autonomously recording OBSs.
f) Howe - ALOHA Cabled Observatory
g) US Ocean Observatory Initiative (OOI)
The
Final Network Design was completed in April 2010. The program consists of two coastal
scale observatories (Endurance and Pioneer), one regional scale observatory
(off Cascadia) and four global scale observatories (Figure 3). Many more details are available on their
web site.
4) Future ION Activities
a) ION is sponsoring and Inter-agency Symposium
(joint with IASPEI, IAPSO amd IAGA) at the 2011 General Assembly of the IUGG in
Melbourne Australia (June 28 to July 8), "Scientific Results from Seafloor Networks", Conveners: M. Best, P. Favali, Y. Kaneda, P.
Grenard, Howe, D. Tarits, P. and R. Stephen,
ION members were encouraged to submit abstracts and to encourage their
colleagues to attend as well. The status of invited speakers at the
ION meeting was: Tsuboi-san - accepted, Andrew
Forbes - accepted, Barbara
Romanowicz - maybe, Fred
Duennebier - declined, Michel-Andre
- no response. [The final list of
invited speakers, resolved in February 2011, is Tsuboi-san, Forbes, Howe (for
Duennebier), and Best (for Michel-Andre and Barnes). ]
5) In July 2011
(the Melbourne IUGG) Ralph Stephen's term as ION Chair will expire. We decided that the Chairmanship should
transfer to a Japanese representative and that the new chair would be announced
at the ION meeting at the Melbourne IUGG.
6) Membership: This past year we added Patrick Grenard,
CTBTO Vienna, to our membership list and Bob Detrick (now at NSF) and John
Orcutt (inactive for many years) have been removed. We welcome suggestions for new
members. See our charter for
criteria.
Figure 3: Location map of the six seafloor
observatories in the US OOI.
Appendix A: Neptune Canada Newsletter – December
2010
NCDec2010news_FINAL_small_web.pdf