User:Jxxl/sandbox

Scientific Motivation
The Axial Seamount portion of the RCA is located more than 500 km offshore and includes sites located within the caldera of Axial Seamount and at its base. The Axial Seamount is an active submarine volcano and on the Juan de Fuca Ridge spreading center.

The Axial Caldera site is located on the summit of the seamount 1500 m below the sea surface. The observatory at the Axial Seamount is the most advanced underwater volcanic observatory in the world. Instrumentation at the Cabled Axial Seamount Array facilitate study of seismic activity, volcanic eruptions, hydrothermal vents, formation and alteration of oceanic crust, and how the temperature and chemical changes associated with volcanic activity affect microbial and macrofaunal communities.

Infrastructure within the caldera has also been augmented by instruments with funding from NSF, the Office of Naval Research and NASA. These instruments span broad science investigations into crustal deformation at the volcano with follow-on studies focused on Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes. New instruments funded by NASA will also provide insights into the search for life on other planets.

The Axial Base site is an open-ocean environment where the North Pacific Current/California Current interacts with the subpolar gyre, making this site an important place where heat, salt, gasses, and biota are transported. Data collection aims to find connections between ocean dynamics, ecosystems, and climate at a range of scales, from basin to regional level.

Design
The Axial Caldera site has five medium-power junction boxes that contain data-collecting instruments. Seismometers and hydrophones collect geophysical data. Pressure-tilt devices detect changes in seafloor height and angle associated with the inflation and deflation of the magma chambers. Several types of instruments including cameras, sensors, and a 3D thermister array are used to study the hydrothermal vents.

At the Axial Base site, junction boxes are paired with a Cabled Deep Profiler Mooring and a Cabled Shallow Profiler Mooring. The Cabled Deep Profiler Mooring contains a Wire-Following Profiler that samples the water column from 150 m below the surface to near bottom (up to 2600 m, depending on water depth). The Cabled Shallow Profiler Mooring samples shallow waters (200 m to just below the surface) with an instrumented science pod. Seafloor infrastructure, such as a broadband seismometer and low-frequency hydrophone, allows the RCA to monitor local and far-field seismic events.

Fiber-optic cables provide power and two-way real-time communication to the instruments from the shore. Live communication allows event response capabilities.

Cyberinfrastructure
The OOI Cyberinfrastructure (CI) manages and integrates data from more than 800 instruments deployed across the five ongoing ocean arrays, linking the marine infrastructure to the global community of users.

The University of California, San Diego initially designed the cyberinfrastructure. The project relocated to Rutgers University in 2016. In October 2020, Oregon State University assumed the cyberinfrastructure responsibilities for the OOI, with an orderly transition of resources and equipment to take place over 2021.

Raw data from the arrays are transmitted to operations centers located in Pacific City (Regional Cabled Array), Oregon State University (uncabled instruments on the Pacific Coast), or Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (uncabled instruments on the Atlantic coast). The data is then uploaded to the OOI CI.

The OOI CI has been in operation since 2013. As of May 2020, it has collected and curated 36 terabytes of data and has served over 189 million requests to users from more than 100 countries. All raw and processed datasets are made available online to users and a full archive of all raw datasets is stored in multiple locations. OOI data quality control procedures were designed with the goal of meeting the IOOS Quality Assurance of Real Time Ocean Data (QARTOD) standards.

The OOI Data Explorer is the primary tool to access datasets. Previous data from the OOI Data Portal is in the process of being transferred to the Data Explorer portal. Access to data and subsets of data is also available through the Raw Data Archive, the Analytical Data Archive, the OOI Environmental Research Division Data Access Program (ERDDAP) server, and the OOI Machine to Machine (M2M) API Interface.