The global component of the US Ocean Observatories Initiative and the global OceanSITES project

The NSF-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) will establish four comprehensive and interactive open-ocean observatories for sustained timeseries observations, two of which are located in the Pacific Basin. At each site they will include four moorings and three gliders, with a wide range of multidisciplinary sensors. These installations will represent infrastructure for the ocean research community and enable both process experiments and climate-timescale investigations. In addition to free data access and mechanisms to manipulate the assets and sensors of the observatories, there will be expansion capacity for user-provided instruments. This presentation will explain the plans and capabilities for these open-ocean observatories. The OOI sites are embedded in the global and international timeseries project OceanSITES, which is an established component of the global ocean observing system. Many countries are contributing to this network. OceanSITES provides coordination, integration into a global system, and a data management framework which enables the accessibility and dissemination of the data to the community. There are presently about 100 sites with 200 platforms globally in OceanSITES. The status and benefits of the project will be explained. New sites are continually being added and both the research and operational community are encouraged to add their open-ocean sustained timeseries sites to OceanSITES.