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Our first in a series of free technical workshops was held on 8 March 2012 at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences in Vancouver. 12 attendees from UBC, Simon Fraser University and the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans joined Ocean Networks Canada staff members for the day-long session.

Scott McLean, Tom Dakin and Jeff Bosma manned the Ocean Networks Canada booth at Oceanology International 2012, the largest ocean technologies exhibition in the world. This 3-day event happens every 2 years in London, UK. Our booth featured Ocean Networks Canada, VENUS, NEPTUNE Canada, ONC Centre of Enterprise and Engagement & BC government displays. Traffic at the booth was heavy.
 

There were so many discussions & meetings that ONCCEE staff were unable to sit in on any presentations or visit all the exhibitor's booths, though Scott did present a talk on behalf of NEPTUNE Canada.

For more than 6 years VENUS has been deploying and operating various camera systems on its network collecting imagery from Saanich Inlet and Strait of Georgia. Growing interest from the research community that rely on visual data from the deep ocean to conduct their experiments have led VENUS to expand the selection of cameras installed on the network. As of December 2011, VENUS operates 4 cameras – two in Saanich Inlet and two in the Strait of Georgia.

Ocean Networks Canada Director, Dr. Kate Moran, introduced Ocean Networks Canada and a new way to explore beneath the ocean's surface to a TEDx audience in Vancouver last November.

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The W.M. Keck Foundation has awarded $1 Million to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) for a new geodesy observatory to be connected to Ocean Networks Canada and the Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Scale Nodes (OOI RSN). This interdisciplinary project, led by Dr.Jeff McGuire and John Collins of WHOI, will allow scientists to monitor three Cascadia subduction zone segments off the coasts of Vancouver Island, Washington and Oregon.

Six years ago at 4:45 AM, 8 Feb 2006, the first VENUS instrument platform was plugged into the central node and brought online. Congratulations to VENUS on another year of groundbreaking science! 

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Ground has been broken and construction is now underway on a new test tank and storage facility at our Marine Technology Centre (MTC).

The Alliance for Coastal Technologies (ACT) is currently accepting preliminary applications from developers, manufacturers, and distributors of commercially available, in situ pH sensors interested in participating in independent performance testing.  ACT will review responses from interested parties and invite those with technologies that meet established criteria to submit a full proposal package.  

Monitoring surface currents in real-time using this technology will bring multiple benefits to a number of organizations, helping them to make important operational decisions. The second station will be installed 20 km to the north in early 2012. Once operational, the radial data from both sites will be combined to generate vector maps of surface currents in a 20 km X 20 km grid between the stations.

Kate Moran, the new Director of NEPTUNE Canada, has been invited to speak at the upcoming TEDx conference in Vancouver on November 12, 2010.

Scientists from Canada and France began deploying a cabled piezometer at 9:45 am (PDT) on Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at the Cascadia Basin site. This is the first operation of the NEPTUNE Canada July 2011 installation and maintenance cruise on the R/V Thompson. In visible company was the R/V Atlantis, the sister ship of the R/V Thompson, with a crew of researchers working on nearby Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) boreholes, an illustration of the high interest in the thin oceanic crust of the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate .

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The Folger Pinnacle instrument platform was installed on August 23, 2010 (watch the installation cruise highlights) and connected on February 2, 2011 by a combined team of Pelagic Technologies divers, the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre (BMSC), and Ocean Networks Canada. Since then, a wealth of data has been gathered by instruments affixed to this 23m deep platform. However, in recent months, Dilumie Abeysirigunawardena, one of our data specialists, noticed a drop in the instruments’ data quality and sensitivity.

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This technology can increase classification rates by providing a continuous stream of objects-of-interest. The IBM InfoSphere Streams system along with new image processing software will be used to automatically flag specific times in the underwater video archives. The processed video will be tagged with the appropriate metadata (e.g. object type, object size, movement, time). The result will be the ability to skip ahead to the next remarkable observation caught on camera without wading through numerous hours of insignificant video. Observation times will be reduced, allowing scientists to reach their conclusions quicker.

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Nobody ever promised this would be easy, especially when it came to installing POGO, our one-of-a-kind vertical profiler system (VPS).