ESONET: An European Sea Observatory Initiative

ESONET is a Multidisciplinary European Network of Excellence (NoE) associating 50 partners from 14 countries and more than 300 scientists and engineers. The goal of this NOE is the lasting integration of European research on deep sea multidisciplinary observatories. Over the first 4 years, the approach is to merge the programs of members organisations by managing marine research activities, addressing the common scientific objectives and by networking activities specially designed for Excellence integration and spreading. Amongst other actions, it works by establishing sea floor infrastructure that will provide platforms for instrumentation deployed throughout the water column and the geosphere below. Those platforms will provide power for instruments and real-time two-way data communications. Firstly, some "demonstration missions" have been selected in January 2008 and are presented here. Demonstration actions are bringing technology excellence at high level for different development phases, implementing the standardisation and interoperability of the different platforms from the consortium. By acquiring relevant time-series of multidisciplinary data, they will be an input for integrated studies, common workshops and a material support to implement a data management plan.