Digitizing the Oceans in real time

The "Ocean Observatories Initiative" is an National Science Foundation Division of Ocean Sciences program that focuses the science, technology, education and outreach of an emerging network of science driven ocean observing systems.

It is a networked infrastructure of science-driven sensor systems to measure the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor as well as the overlying atmosphere, providing a fully integrated system collecting data on coastal, regional and global scales.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative is a project funded by the National Science Foundation.

It is a networked infrastructure of science-driven sensor systems to measure the physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor as well as the overlying atmosphere, providing a fully integrated system collecting data on coastal, regional and global scales.
The goal of the OOI is to deliver data and data products for a 25-year-plus time period within an expandable architecture that can meet emerging technical advances in ocean science.

These data are freely accessible online through the OOi Cyberinfrastructure.
Construction of the OOI commenced in 2009.

Initial installations of scientific instrumentation began in summer 2013, and the project was to be in full operation by early 2015.
The OOI project builds on the heritage of the ship-based expeditions of the last century and the more recent emphasis to increase ocean observation and in situ monitoring.

 

From PopSci by Ian Graber-Stiehl

Over the summer, while the rest of us were getting tan (via lasers, of course, as is PopSci’s style), the National Science Foundation’s R/V Sikuliaq took a 39-day Vision 16 cruise.
It wasn’t exactly a typical cruise.

Rather than kicking back, the crew was busy surveying the cables that feed a network of observatories collecting open-access marine and climate data, called the Ocean Observatory Initiative--the newest chess piece in the NSF’s campaign to stitch together a massive data collection network.
Harvard biologist Peter Girguis assures PopSci that “Let’s put [an array of sensors] on the seafloor and see what it can do” was part of the thought process guiding the NSF’s move to deploy the multi-million dollar network of autonomous lab equipment and underwater vehicles.
Sadly, it was not the sole motivation behind it.
After all, it took $386 million and a nearly a decade of development, but finally up and running, the OOI is “the largest fixed oceanographic observatory in the world,” according to director Greg Ulses.
Translation: by size, scale, and terabytes, this set-it-and-forget-it web of fixed lab equipment dwarfs any other system collecting data on the ocean.
Drawing from a network of 830 instruments on 83 platforms across seven different sites, the OOI digitizes the oceans in real-time, into a data stream on everything from pH to temperature, accessible to anyone, from anywhere.

And less than two months into its debut, the Vision 16 cruise put in some upgrades to the system, the equivalent of a periodic cell phone update.
The system’s instruments and cables are all modular, designed to be regularly swapped for new hardware.
But, minus requiring a cruise ship full of engineers to hack out the old components and drop in the new, as part of a plan to expand the platform’s technology over the next 25 years, it’s practically the same as a cellphone update.
Nonetheless, the OOI is back up in full force, and addressing what Girguis believes is a fundamental challenge of oceanography--one that makes the cruise’s name oddly appropriate: visibility.
While drones and hyperspectral satellites can easily monitor events on land, even an ultralight beam starts scattering 50 meters into the electromagnetically opaque ocean, preventing scientists from getting a clear picture.
Similarly, the glut of oceanic data we already have is largely scattered and unorganized, so marine scientists have to overcome both a literal and figurative lack of visibility.
“The OOI, and all these other various” oceanic mapping programs, are a pretty big deal for many ocean researchers. They produce far more data than is usually published, and can “stitch it together in such a way that a new generation of scientists can look at it with their fresh, computationally savvy eyes,” said Girguis.

AUV by Yann Lepage (Underwater pictures)

The “all these other various programs” bit is where things get exciting.
For several years, the international community has been working under an joint initiative spearheaded by US and EU, called COOP+.
Piloted by the NSF, on the American end, its mandate is to expand the Global Earth Observation System of Systems or GEOSS: a massive web of open-access networks that bring Big Earth Data to scientists, courtesy of arrays of sensory equipment.
Alongside other international programs, and the massive DataONE database fed by them all--the OOI is just one (albeit particularly large) data source among the many that the NSF is campaigning to combine.

But the best insight into the scale and precariousness of this behind-the-scenes chess game comes from NEON, or the National Ecological Observatory Network, which will function as a cousin to the OOI when it launches in 2018.
Through eighty-one field sites, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data center, and partnerships with dozens of universities, NEON will collect air, sea, and land data in real time. However, the program’s development hasn’t exactly been smooth.
Prior to recent management changes, it suffered delays, more than a few mishaps with a $469 million budget, and subsequently, a fair share of opposition from both budget-minded Republican House committee members, and from within the oceanographic community.

Once online, though, NEON will be simply one of thirty-one data suppliers for DataONE, which itself is just one particularly large repository fed mostly with information from the U.S. and the E.U, all buried within an international web that’s effectively turning the entire Earth into 0’s and 1’s.

So, next time you’re on a cruise, kicking back with a copy of PopSci and getting the latest on the fight to research climate change and study ocean wildlife, remember--on their cruise, a bunch of engineers built a digital Eye of Sauron that’s powering that fight...and tracking your ship’s carbon footprint.

Links :

• GeoGarage blog : Wiring the world below

The new Viking invasion: How Denmark's offshore wind giant conquered the UK seas

 The Future of European Offshore Wind

From The Telegraph by Emily Gosden

Denmark, Andrea Leadsom suggested, might have reason to be thankful to the UK.
As the then-energy minister reminded MPs in April, the Scandinavian country is recipient of “the bill-payer subsidy for the most prolific offshore wind installer in the world”.
“The UK has 50pc of the world’s offshore wind and the Danish developers have benefited enormously,” she said.

A turbine being installed at Dong Energy's Burbo Bank Extension project

credit MHI Vestas

The installer in question was Dong Energy.
Majority-owned by the government of Denmark, the oil and gas company-turned-offshore wind developer has conquered the seas around Britain in unrivalled fashion
And, as Leadsom’s comments hinted, there is some unease at the spoils of this new Viking invasion.

The London Array offshore wind farm,

one of the eight existing projects in which Dong Energy has a stake

credit : Emily Gosden

From its modest start with the 90 megawatt (MW) Barrow offshore wind farm, one of the UK’s first when it was completed in 2006, Dong has built an empire encompassing ownership or part-ownership of eight projects in UK waters.
They include a 25pc stake in the 175-turbine London Array, which, at 630MW, is the biggest offshore wind farm in the world to date.
In total, of the 5.1 gigawatts (GW) of turbines installed in the UK waters, Dong has interests in just over two-fifths (2.2GW) of them; its actual ownership stakes equate to 985MW.
Everything it has built to date receives subsidies through the Renewables Obligation (RO) scheme; analysis of Ofgem data suggests Dong’s share of the subsidies last year, on top of the wholesale electricity price, could easily have topped £250m.

source : DONG Energy Corporate

And that’s just the start.
Dong is currently constructing four more offshore wind farms.

There is the Burbo Bank Extension (258MW), where the world’s largest turbine, an 8MW beast taller than the Gherkin, was installed last week.

Then there is Race Bank (570MW), the Walney Extension (659MW) and Hornsea One, which, at 1.2GW, should seize the crown of the biggest in the world when completed in 2020.

The first new 8MW turbine being installed in UK waters 

credit : MHI Vestas

Of the 10GW of turbines the Government expects to be spinning in UK waters by the end of this decade, Dong Energy is due to be involved in almost exactly half.
The company says its new investment will total £6bn, on top of £6bn spent in the UK to date.
And with eye-watering investment figures, come even more eye-watering subsidies.

Aside from Race Bank, which qualifies for the RO, the other three under construction were awarded subsidies in April 2014 under the Government’s new 'contracts for difference’ scheme, guaranteeing them a fixed price for the electricity they generate for 15 years.

 photo : Bel Air Aviation

For Burbo Bank and Walney, the contract price is £150 per megawatt-hour (MWh) or about three and a half times the current wholesale power price; for Hornsea, a marginally cheaper £140/MWh.
Government estimates obtained by the Telegraph suggest that when these three projects start generating they will receive subsidies, over and above the wholesale power price, of £880m a year. Over their lifetime, even on a discounted basis, the payments will be worth a cool £7.6bn.

Dong Energy UK wind farm interests

To understand how Dong Energy built such a dominant position, you have to go back a decade, to when it was formed through the merger of the original Danish Oil & Natural Gas company with five electricity-focused Danish energy companies to form a national champion.
“The Danish Government had very much said, 'we are massively reliant on imported coal and oil and gas’. They wanted to minimise that,” explains Brent Cheshire, Dong Energy’s UK country chairman.

“Dong was state-owned so their mind-set was: we are moving into wind, wind is going to be the big thing.”
The company set about transforming itself from one focused on fossil fuels to one focused on wind.

And as it did so, it spied opportunity across the North Sea, where the UK Government had also thrown itself behind offshore wind in pursuit of climate change targets.
“The Dong management team said, the UK has potentially got much more opportunity in similar geographical conditions. So we have a mousetrap sitting here in Denmark that we can export,” Cheshire says.

Dong Energy has installed turbines in Danish waters but also saw it as an export opportunity

credit : Dong Energy

John Musk, utilities analyst at RBC Capital Markets, also believes that Dong Energy’s state-controlled ownership structure was key.

“During the time when other utilities largely had been constrained in terms of the amount of capex they were able to put to work and were cutting back on projects, the Danish government was able to look at longer term and pursue the offshore wind strategy,” he says.

“They were more focused on this than others. For Dong, offshore wind was their raison d’être.”

 Horns 1 & 2 wind farm in Denmark with the GeoGarage platform
(DGA nautical chart)

It was with the awarding of the first round of the new renewable subsidy contracts in 2014 that Dong’s UK dominance really started to be noticed, as the developer of three of the five offshore wind projects to win Government backing.
The deals have since proved highly controversial: the National Audit Office found that the prices for the subsidies, set administratively by the Government, were likely to have been unnecessarily high.

Less than a year after they were handed out, a competitive auction to award subsidies for further offshore wind appeared to prove the point, with rival developers securing contracts to build offshore wind projects for less than £120/MWh, some 15pc-20pc below the prices awarded to Dong.
“They [Dong’s contracts] were way too high. They were too generous, absolutely,” says one rival industry executive.

“If the Government had run an auction there and then, it would have come up with a much lower number.”
Dong executives are at pains to deny this.

“At the time we got the [contracts], our competitors said the prices were unrealistically low,” says Cheshire. “I had personal phone calls where I was berated for destroying the market.”
“Everybody was saying, no one will build at these prices, it’s the end of the industry,” insists Samuel Leupold, Dong Energy’s vice-president for wind power.

How the latest turbines stack up against London's tallest buildings

Dong’s commitment to offshore wind, he suggests, enabled it to see the potential – and the need – for cost reduction where others didn’t.

Even then, he insists, it still regarded those prices as “a challenge”.
“We worked extremely hard. We put our neck on the block and said, we fully agree with the Government in accusing offshore wind of being too expensive. It was blood, sweat and tears to bring the cost down,” he says.

“I think I have the arrogance to say that the rest of the industry was over-promising and under-delivering. We knew that, given we were so much betting on offshore wind, we needed to deliver.”

One of the key ways of delivering lower costs has been through continual moves to bigger, more powerful turbines, culminating in those 8MW turbines at Burbo Bank.

“We have bet on technology and we have taken the risks of being the first implementer,” says Cheshire.

He insists that the award of the 2014 contracts enabled the industry cost-reduction that followed, giving the supply chain a pipeline of projects and enabling economic of scale.
Despite Dong’s protestations, many share the belief that Dong got a very good deal on its three contracts.

“I think they are certainly going to be getting attractive returns, and they are likely to be higher than the returns they would be able to win today,” says Musk of RBC, who initiated coverage this summer after Dong’s IPO, which valued the company at £10bn.

The perception that the contracts were generous has only grown after Dong agreed a contract for a wind farm in the Netherlands in July, that will be up and running around the same time as Hornsea One, with a subsidy contract at just €72.70/MWh.

While Dong stresses this is not comparable with its £140/MWh at Hornsea for a number of reasons – not least as it excludes €20-30/MWh in transmission costs – it is clearly still substantially cheaper.
“The question now for the Government,” says the rival wind executive, “is: you are where you are, we work on the assumption no-one’s about to rip the contracts up, so how do you get the best value out of those contracts? Anybody sitting with a contract at £150/MWh should be getting pushed really bloody hard to get investment in the UK and to buy supply from UK-based organisations.”
The Government had set a target of 50pc UK content in offshore wind, which Leupold says is “realistic” for its next projects.

London array

credit : Bloomberg

Leadsom as energy minister was vocal in calling for developers who secured the early contracts to maximise the benefits to the UK, calling it “payback time”.

With energy now paired with industrial strategy in a department, it seems likely her successors will also have a keen eye on UK content.
Leupold issues a warning shot on this front

 “The idea that every country gets a vertically-integrated industry that produces all the parts of the turbines in that country itself, that is what politicians dream of,” he says.
“But everybody understands that, since every country dreams of that, you’d basically build up the industry five times around the North Sea, and that is of course the contrary of becoming cost-efficient. So the reality is you split up the scope and say you have different hubs where you specialise in a certain discipline.”

 London Array Wind Farm, April 17, 2016 (Planet Labs)

For the projects now under construction, the blades will be made in the UK: either by Siemens in Hull, or MHI Vestas in the Isle of Wight. 

Some foundations may come from Teesside, but many turbine parts will be produced elsewhere. The Siemens nacelles come from Germany, while towers are likely to be sourced across Europe.
“The tower is a commodity, everybody can make towers. The blade, believe me, the blade is the frontier, technology wise,” Leupold says.

Britain may have to accept parts made in Germany but, he says, “our next German project will use blades made in the Isle of Wight.”
Whatever battles lie ahead over the supply chain, the new Government has already reaffirmed plans to continue the UK’s drive for offshore wind.

More subsidies are due to be awarded this parliament, subject to cost-reduction targets that Dong says it is confident it can meet.
And that means Dong’s conquest of the North Sea is not over yet.

Last month it got planning consent for Hornsea Two, which at 1.8GW is the biggest to have got permission anywhere in the world.

Musk says he “fully expects” Dong to secure subsidies for the construction of at least part the project in the next auction, due early next year.
Plans for Hornsea Three, at up to 2.4GW, are already being drawn up; there is talk that a Four and Five could follow.
Dong’s position as the market leader looks safe “for the forseeable future”, Musk concludes.

“It’s unlikely they will be superseded by anyone else.”

Links :

• Vattenfalls news : Denmark writes wind power history

Flying the course : a game changer

Now it can be told! The foiling tack is a game-changer.

SoftBank Team Japan​ and then ORACLE TEAM USA, started foil-tacking upwind back in April.

Earlier this summer, ORACLE TEAM USA, added the move to its repertoire when sailing in full manual-mode, and now the race is on to get around the race course without coming down off the foils.

"It’s very likely that the boat that can make it around the racecourse without touching the water will win this America’s Cup," said tactician/sailing team manager Tom Slingsby​.

Panoramic picture showing boats sailing down New York's Hudson River

It shows New York at its best - on a sunny day, with the Hudson River teeming with boats.
Record-breaking US astronaut Jeff Williams posted these amazing images, and showed just how impressive pictures from the International Space Station can be.
They show boats sailing down the Hudson River, with the white wave trails behind them clearly visible.
'Clear day over a busy New York harbor,' he tweeted, adding 'Hopefully more sunshine in store as #Hermine drifts away.' 

He also posted a video appearing to show a trip down the Hudson.
However, if fact it was simply a pan of the giant high resolution picture taken using the ISS's cameras and stitched together on Earth.
'They are actually video clips made of panoramas of still photography stitched together, and folks on the ground have made a video clip of them,' he explained.
The ISS has several cameras on board, and a selection of lenses for them.
It also has a cupola, which Williams described as a 'Window on the World' to give a wide angle view.
Astronauts have used hand-held cameras to photograph the Earth for more than 40 years.
Beginning with the Mercury missions in the early 1960s, astronauts have taken more than 1.5 million photographs of the Earth.
Earlier this year, Scott Kelly launched into the record books after spending the most cumulative days in space for any US astronaut, with 520 days 10 hours and 33 minutes.
(courtesy of DailyMail by Mark Prigg) 

 A resilient Lower Manhattan buzzes with energy fifteen years later.
Image: April 5, 2016 (Planet)

Links :

• NASA : NASA Remembers September 11th

 

NZ Linz update in the GeoGarage platform

5 nautical raster charts updated

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