strait of georgia

Jun 1, 2016

A Tenth Anniversary Inshore Maintenance Cruise

The Canadian Coast Guard Ship John P. Tully in Saanich Inlet.

Ocean Networks Canada's tenth annual expedition season began on 28 April 2016 with an 8-day cruise to maintain the ocean observing instrumentation and platforms in Saanich Inlet and the Strait of Georgia. The Canadian Coast Guard Ship John P. Tully and the ITB Subsea Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) Oceanic Explorer supported the recovery, repair and deployment of seafloor installations and...

Observing Seasonal Marine Changes with BC Ferries

BC Ferries takes a closer look at the 2016 spring bloom in the Strait of Georgia

Every year, March brings two kinds of spring blooms to the temperate British Columbia coast: one involves an annual flower count, which is the envy of the country; the other turns the Salish Sea green with an explosion of marine productivity. BC Ferries plays an important role on both counts, bringing visitors across the Strait of Georgia to enjoy the Island’s blossoms while simultaneously hosting Ocean Networks Canada’s (ONC) instruments that collect marine data in the Strait of Georgia.

ONC measures ocean properties at the sea surface using advanced instruments installed onboard three ferry routes. The route from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay was instrumented...

Ocean Networks Canada teams up with BC Ferries to monitor Canada’s busiest waterway

July 30, 2015

NEWS RELEASE

VICTORIA, B.C. — The University of Victoria’s Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) has expanded its world-class ocean observatories to include data collected from three BC Ferries.

With instrumentation in the ferries’ hull and a weather station on deck, scientists can now observe ocean surface properties continuously while the ferries transit the Strait of Georgia between Vancouver and Vancouver Island.

The strait is a vital waterway to understand. Not only is it Canada’s busiest trade route, it’s home to the world’s largest commercial salmon fishery, important habitat for herring to spawn...

Second BC Ferry Data Now Available

Ocean Networks Canada’s Strait of Georgia ferry monitoring program officially expanded operations to a second ferry, the Spirit of Vancouver Island, in October 2014. This ferry, part of BC Ferries fleet, connects Vancouver Island and the mainland transiting between Victoria, BC, and Vancouver, BC.The main oceanographic interest of this route is that the ferry travels through more saline, oceanic conditions on the western part of the route through to fresher Fraser River influenced waters on the eastern part of the route. The data collected along the way continues the long-term time series initiative established by Dr. Jim Gower (Fisheries and Oceans Canada).

The ferry is instrumented to make high-resolution measurements (...

BC Ferries | ferry data | VENUS Ferry System | strait of georgia

Understanding the Oceans

Blog post by Dr. Rich Pawlowicz. Originally published on Wiring the Abyss 2014 Expedition portal.

Understanding how the oceans work is hard, because we almost always don't have enough measurements to even know what the ocean is doing, never mind why. One of the exciting things in the VENUS Observatory expansion plan was the installation of a radar system that was specially designed to provide estimates of surface currents over a large region covering the Fraser plume. What's the Fraser plume?

Fraser...

strait of georgia | Fraser River | CODAR | Mark Halverson | Rich Pawlowicz

Spring Bloom Observed in Ferry Data

The biological transition from winter to spring conditions in the Strait of Georgia is characterized by a spring phytoplankton bloom. Inter-annual timing of this phytoplankton bloom can vary by up to 6 weeks (Collins et al. 2009). This broad time range introduces the potential for a mismatch in the timing of the major annual period of zooplankton productivity in the Strait, which can in turn, influence the productivity of higher trophic levels such as fish and sea birds. Understanding the dominant factors influencing the timing of the bloom is therefore the subject of considerable interest (Collins et al. 2009; Allen & Wolfe 2013; Gower et al. 2013).

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Maintaining the VENUS Observatory: March 2014 Expedition

Twice a year, the Ocean Networks Canada engineering and science teams head out to sea to service and maintain our coastal observatory in the Salish Sea.

Just west of the dock at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, the Saanich Inlet array lies in 100 m of water. Operating since 2006, this fjord network was the first comprehensive cabled ocean observatory in the world. A remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is deployed from the deck of the Canadian Coast Guard Ship, John P. Tully and lowered to the bottom, where it can access and service the instrument suites connected to the network.

Research here includes benthic ecology, plankton dynamics, and monitoring complex seasonal biogeochemical cycles. At each station, VENUS maintains a standard...

Introduction to the Strait of Georgia