Hobart

Seminar Abstract

Friday 11 December 2009, 2.00pm (Tas time)
CSIRO Auditorium, Hobart

Sameer Tilak
Open Source DataTurbine Initiative
San Diego Supercomputer Center
University of California at San Diego
USA

DataTurbine and the 'Digital Moorea' coral reef monitoring project

Digital Moorea is a collaborative project to monitor the coral reefs surrounding the island of Moorea, French Polynesia with real-time sensors connected to high-performance backend resources and sophisticated client applications. It is envisioned to be a living laboratory for long-term studies of marine ecology and a testbed for evolving technologies for environmental and biological sensing, communications, and analysis. The Digital Moorea project was initiated in 2007 with funding from the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The overall goal was to develop an integrated cyberinfrastructure that supports the complete lifecycle of data products (from acquisition to publication) and the full range of scientific activities (including monitoring, experimentation, analysis, modelling, and collaboration).

The heart of the Digital Moorea cyberinfrastructure is the open source DataTurbine middleware that integrates and serves the data from these sensors. Our approach involves incrementally integrating stand-alone sensor deployments into the end-to-end cyberinfrastructure. From October 2007 until May 2009, our team at the Open Source Data Turbine Initiative (OSDTI) collaboratively developed designs and fielded prototypes to test infrastructure ideas and components, culminating with operational field deployment in May 2009. Data acquisition and management has been constant and reliable since the deployment. DataTurbine has proved to be the key enabling technology in this system.

On the September 29, 2009, an 8.3-magnitude earthquake struck the Samoan Islands at 7:48 a.m. (French Polynesian time). As a result of the earthquake, five small waves between 25-70 centimetres (9.9-27.6 inches) were measured off Papeete between 11:10 am and noon Tuesday according to the Tahiti Presse. The Digital Moorea system captured the signal from this tsunami in readings from a Conductivity, Temperature and Depth (CTD) sensor located in Cooks Bay. Although not specifically designed for tsunami detection, the Digital Moorea system demonstrated the feasibility of using such cyberinfrastructure for these types of applications.

The cyberinfrastructure developed under this project, and the lessons learned in their deployment and operation, will be useful to a number of environmental science applications and research groups. In this talk, I will cover the involvement of the OSDTI group in the Digital Moorea Cyberinfrastructure activities as well as other sensor-based environmental monitoring applications.

Seminar recording

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Location:
CSIRO = Marine Laboratories Auditorium, Castray Esplanade, Hobart

For further information, or to schedule a seminar, contact:
To schedule a seminar, contact:
Clothilde Langlais, (Oceanographic seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5399
Natalie Kelly, (Biology/Modelling seminars) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research 0438 452 483
Jillian Enraght-Moony, (seminar administrator) CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (03) 6232 5320
Communications Manager, Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems CRC (03) 6226 2265
Margaret Hazelwood, Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies (IASOS) University of Tasmania (03) 6226 2971

Last updated 22/12/09