OceanSense: Realtime Ocean Environmental Sensing

How important are the oceans? Earth is the only planet in the Solar System that has a vast open ocean of liquid water, and it is the ocean that makes our planet uniquely life-bearing. Today, ocean life is regarded by many as more important in the total scheme of things than even plant life on land. There are microscopic plant cells in the top layer of the ocean that produce four times as much oxygen and food as plants on land produce. The bottom line is that there is no life without water and the global ocean is the defining characteristic of our planet. It is the original ecosystem.

Oceanography is of great importance for human beings. For hundreds of years, people have been recording ocean environmental data from scientific expeditions to coastal environmental research. However, even today the only real-time environmental data observation method is through Argo (Array for Real-time Geostrophic Oceanography), which does not come close to meeting the true requirements of oceanography research. Researchers at the Ocean University of China have developed a wireless sensor network for environmental monitoring at sea believing that with the recent progress of sensor networks - it is the tool for the future collection of data for oceanography research.  

Deployed off the seashore near the Moutain LAO of Qingdao, China, OceanSense is a system designed to obtain ocean environmental data in real-time. Using the TelosB Mote platform, the nodes are deployed on the surface of the sea collecting environmental data, such as temperature, light, tide velocity, sensor depth and RSSI from the testbed. The TelosB Motes were encapsulated in bottles and attached to lightweight supporting equipment to make them waterproof as well as raise them 1m above the ocean surface to enable optimal signal strength. To view the process used to create these ocean ready nodes, watch this video that shows the testing, creation and deployment of the OceanSense System.

The OceanSense system has been running for more than half a year, providing environmental monitoring data for further study. The motes communicate with the base station, which transmits collected data to a visualization system running on a database server. Users may then access the data using a browser-based web application that provides a scalar field mapping tool to depict temperature and light intensity as well as a vector field mapping tool to display the tide velocity.

The current system consists of 20 sensor nodes deployed in the field, reporting sensing data continuously to the base station. The complete system is designed to scale to hundreds of sensors covering the sea area off Taipingjiao, Tsingtao. For more information on the OceanSense solution visit the site here and click on the video below for a brief demo of the system and the deployment.