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Ncris Capability 5.12 2008/09 Annual Progress Report

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Ncris Capability 5.12 2008/09 Annual Progress Report IMOS is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy and the Super Science Initiative NCRIS CAPABILITY 5.12 2008/09 ANNUAL PROGRESS REPORT TABLE OF CONTENTS: 1 Executive summary 2 2 Description of activities: 3 2.1 Research infrastructure 3 2.2 Access and pricing 14 2.3 Performance indicators 14 2.4 Governance 15 2.5 Promotion 15 3 Description of progress against milestones 17 4 Discussion of deviations from the Project Plan 17 5 Discussion of financial and human resources 17 6 Audit statement 17 7 Confidential information 17 APPENDICES: A Facility Reports: 18 A.1 Argo Australia 18 A.2 Enhanced Measurements from Ships of Opportunity (SOOP) 31 A.3 Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) 48 A.4 Australian National Facility for Ocean Gliders (ANFOG) 51 A.5 Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Facility (AUV) 57 A.6 Australian National Mooring Network (ANMN) 67 A.7 Australian Coastal Ocean Radar Network (ACORN) 84 A.8 Australian Acoustic Tagging and Monitoring System (AATAMS) 89 A.9 Facility for Automated Intelligent Monitoring of Marine Systems (FAIMMS) 97 A.10 electronic Marine Information Infrastructure (eMII) 102 A.11 Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) 112 B Node Reports: 123 B.1 Bluewater and Climate Node 123 B.2 Great Barrier Reef Ocean Observing System (GBROOS) 124 B.3 New South Wales Integrated Marine Observing System (NSWIMOS) 127 B.4 Southern Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (SAIMOS) 130 B.5 West Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (WAIMOS) 133 C Milestone Report 136 D List of Acronyms 143 E Financial Statements 148 Annual Progress Report 2008/09 Page 1 of 156 1. Executive summary In the past year, installation of the majority of equipment in the Integrated Marine Observing System has been completed. The year culminated with the launch of the IMOS Ocean Portal, an innovative system that provides free and public access to all IMOS data via the internet. IMOS facilities will now undergo a transition from ordering, testing, and deploying equipment, to producing data streams and refining sampling strategies and data quality control methods. The creation and development of a long-term, nationally-integrated, marine and climate research data infrastructure has now begun in earnest. Data streams from all but one IMOS Facility are now available via the Ocean Portal, and it is expected that all IMOS data will be on line before the end of 2009. The manner of data delivery has attracted the attention of several other NCRIS capabilities (AuScope, TERN, Atlas of Living Australia) and steps are being taken to explore how the IMOS data delivery mechanism, which involves integration of the Portal, the Metadata Entry and Search Tool, and the national Data Fabric storage, can be shared with other capabilities. In the May 2009 Federal Budget, IMOS was awarded a further $52million under the Marine and Climate Super Science Initiative, with funding from the Education Investment Fund. This decision, along with related marine and climate science initiatives, is a significant milestone in the creation and development of the infrastructure required to enable sustained observation of Australia’s vast ocean territory under changing climatic conditions. The Director and Advisory Board, in consultation with the research community and its stakeholders, are working on development of a Five Year Strategy (2009-13) which will establish an agreed approach to ocean observing that builds on the strengths of national collaboration, adapts to new knowledge learned as our oceans are observed, and responds to emerging global trends. Major highlights of the 2008/09 year are as follows: • The IMOS Ocean Portal was launched on 29 June 2009, which means that IMOS data is now available to users. • Argo Australia surpassed its goal of deploying 50 floats during the year, with 69 deployments due to increased co-investment and longer float survival rates resulting from early adoption of new battery technology. There are now 225 active Australian Argo floats, exceeding the 180 float target for the array. • Significant progress was made in the delivery of real time data-streams from the Ships of Opportunity (SOOP) Facility, including to the Global Time Series. The increasing participation of commercial vessels, as well as research vessels, is particularly pleasing. • Success in Argo and SOOP mean that IMOS data is being taken up by databases, operational forecasting systems, and modelling activities around the world, which directly benefits understanding of the Australian region, and increases our leverage as a global leader in the under-sampled Southern hemisphere. • The Southern Ocean Time Series (SOTS) Facility successfully deployed two test versions of the Pulse mooring and is on track to deploy the production version in September 2009. Annual Progress Report 2008/09 Page 2 of 156 • Regular deployment of gliders into the Regional Nodes commenced in November 2008, and has continued throughout the reporting period. Simultaneous deployment of five gliders in four regions was achieved. • The Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) conducted a further four deployments, with a focus on describing biological assemblages on rocky reef systems in Marine Protected Areas of southern Tasmania, and on deep coral reef systems at Scott Reef in Western Australia. The high resolution stereo imagery and 3D reconstructions produced by the Facility are considered to be world-leading. • The Australian National Mooring Network (ANMN) has now begun to operate as a national observing system based on moored infrastructure, with deployment and recovery of gear and up-load of data from all four regional arrays, the National Reference Stations, and the acoustic observatories. This is a significant achievement. • The Coastal Radar Facility completed its second and one-half of its third of six installations. • The Australian Acoustic Tagging and Monitoring System (AATAMS) Facility has deployed 330 receivers, including new lines off Perth and Sydney. The Ningaloo array has logged more than two million detections. • The world’s first large-scale coral reef wireless sensor network has been deployed on the reefs of the southern Great Barrier Reef (GBR), with deployments in the central and northern GBR to come. • The Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) Facility is producing new sea surface temperature products, and the Distributed Active Archive Centre (DAAC) is close to coming on line. 2. Description of activities: 2.1 Research infrastructure The 11 IMOS Facilities are grouped according to similarity of activity, measurements and observed phenomena as follows: • Data management (eMII, SRS) • Bluewater and climate (Argo, SOOP, SOTS) • Coastal currents and water properties (ACORN, ANFOG, ANMN) • Coastal ecosystems (AATAMS, AUV, FAIMMS) Data management • eMarine Information Infrastructure (eMII) • Satellite Remote Sensing (SRS) Background The aim of IMOS is to make free, open and timely data and enhanced data products available to users. The eMII and SRS facilities are the fundamental linking component to all other investments in IMOS since it is the means by which IMOS data and satellite data from a variety of sources will be accessed and distributed. The eMII and SRS provide access to the IMOS streams of data and will develop interoperability across data streams and value added data-products. Annual Progress Report 2008/09 Page 3 of 156 Although the IMOS facilities are single function and widely distributed about Australia, IMOS is essentially implemented as a multidisciplinary observing system on a regional basis, with the main Nodes being the oceanic climate and bluewater component interfaced with continental shelf and coastal components in Western Australia (WAIMOS), Southern Australia (SAIMOS), New South Wales (NSWIMOS) and the Great Barrier Reef (GBROOS). Through the data management components of eMII and SRS these systems are integrated to provide a single national capability for observing and monitoring the oceans and seas around Australia. The activities build upon the work by the Australian Ocean Data Centre Joint Facility (AODCJF) and the BlueNet Project. AODCJF is a joint venture between six Australian Government marine data agencies – Australian Institute of Marine Science, Australian Antarctic Division, Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Geoscience Australia and the RAN Directorate of Oceanography and Meteorology. The BlueNet project (completed March 2009) extended the AODCJF initiative by linking universities to the AODCJF virtual data facility to establish a national distributed marine science data network supporting the long term data curation requirements and data access needs of Australia’s marine science researchers. Recently, unspent funds from the BlueNet project have been allocated to eMII to establish the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) Development Office. These funds will be used to engage the agencies of AODCJF and universities in the culture of data sharing and facilitate an Australia-wide oceans data network. Implementation progress eMII has now established a working infrastructure for end-to-end data management, search, discovery and access to IMOS data. See Appendix A.10, which outlines the significant achievements of eMII during 2008/09. The Ocean Portal can be accessed through the IMOS website (www.imos.org.au) or via http://imos.aodn.org.au and the IMOS MEST via http://imosmest.aodn.org.au. The SRS activities are intended to bolster the Australian satellite reception system,
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