Seminar – Ocean Observatories: Open Access to the Open Ocean

Katherine Duncan
Dr. Michael (Mike) Vardaro  | UW OOI
Presenting: "Ocean Observatories: Open Access to the Open Ocean"
Hosted by the MLML Invertebrate Ecology Lab

MLML Seminar | November 19th, 2024 at 4pm (PDT)

Watch the Live Stream here or here

Ocean Observatories: Open Access to the Open Ocean

Building on the legacy of ship-based oceanographic expeditions, recent technological progress has begun to transform many approaches to ocean research – a shift from expeditionary science to a permanent presence in the ocean. New developments in sensor design, computational speed, communications bandwidth, miniaturization, genomic analyses, high-definition imaging, robotics, and data assimilation, modeling, and visualization techniques continue to open new possibilities for remote scientific inquiry and discovery. One example of this approach is the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), an integrated infrastructure program composed of science-driven platforms and sensor systems that measure physical, chemical, geological, and biological properties and processes from the sub-seafloor to the air-sea interface. The project is delivering real-time and near real-time open-access data within an expandable architecture that can incorporate emerging technical advances in ocean science over its 25-year-plus lifespan. The OOI network was designed to address specific science questions that will lead to a better understanding of our oceans, enhancing our capabilities to address critical issues such as climate change, ecosystem variability, ocean acidification, and carbon cycling.

 

Dr. Mike Vardaro

Research Scientist, University of Washington

Mike has worked with the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative since 2011; as a Project Scientist at Oregon State University focusing on designing, testing, and deploying the Endurance Array off the coast of Oregon and Washington; as the OOI Data Manager at Rutgers University, working with the Cyberinfrastructure (CI) team to monitor and evaluate quality-controlled data streams for the OOI user community; and currently as a Research Scientist at the University of Washington on the Regional Cabled Array, which streams real-time data to shore from a network of 150 diverse instruments that span the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. He has also been a marine science lecturer at San Jose State University since 2020. Prior to working with the OOI, he designed and deployed photographic and oceanographic instrumentation in the Gulf of Mexico (while earning a Master's in Oceanography at Texas A&M), Northeastern Pacific (as a Ph.D. project at Scripps Institution of Oceanography), and Southeastern Atlantic oceans (MBARI postdoc) to study the links between surface productivity, carbon flux, and deep benthic invertebrate populations, and how such systems change over time.