VENUS: future science on a coastal mid-depth observatory

The Victoria experimental network under the sea (VENUS) is a cabled observatory under construction off the in-land, coastal waters of southern Vancouver Island. Water depths in the region exceed 300 m, distinguishing this observatory as mid-depth in comparison to the shallower coastal observatories such as LEO-15, and the deeper observatories such as MARS. The coastal waters of southern Vancouver Island are rich in biological, chemical, and physical process. The long term monitoring and the process oriented experiments planned for VENUS will greatly improve our understanding of theses complex in-land marine environments. A cornerstone of the VENUS project, and it´s parent project NEPTUNE, will be a novel data management and archive system (DMAS), that will not only function as a repository for the vast quantities of oceanographic data, but provide an intuitive and exploratory interface to the entire data archive over the anticipated 20 years of the facility.