Design of a Cabled Seafloor Observatory for Marine Ecological Environment Monitoring

Abstract

Abstract Cabled seafloor in-situ observation systems have drawn much attention in recent years for their capability of facilitating long-term all-weather deep-sea data-intense marine observations. The Penglai in-situ seafloor observation system for ecological environment monitoring is proposed in this paper. The current system consists of an on-shore station, a primary node, and two secondary nodes, but more nodes can be hosted due to its scalability. A looped backbone network connects the on-shore station and primary nodes. Each primary node can host up to four secondary nodes, and each secondary node can host up to eight different sensors. Marine observation data and system work state data are collected and backed up by the on-shore station in a real-time manner. Users can access the ocean observation data via a web page interface. The proposed system has been deployed for more than half a year and will continue to work after that. The field experiment showed that the proposed system worked smoothly in system state monitoring and marine data acquisition. A large amount of oceanographic data with videos has been achieved for future studies.