SenseOCEAN
Marine sensors for the 21st Century
The marine environment plays an essential role in the Earth's climate, provides resources,
recreational opportunities and is a vital transportation route. The marine system remains
poorly understood as far as many chemical and physical parameters are concerned. This
lack of understanding limits our ability to efficiently monitor the system, and for instance
to look at the effects that climate change will have on fisheries, how pollutants move
through the environment or how the environment is affected by varying temporal and
spatial scales. |
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SenseOCEAN draws together established and
world leading marine sensor developers from
across Europe, to develop a new highly integrated,
multifunction, cost-effective and mass
deployable in-situ marine biogeochemical sensor
system. This collaborative project will provide
a quantum leap in the ability to quantify
a suite of currently hard to measure biogeochemical
parameters. These are crucial to the
scientific understanding of the oceans, management
of ocean resources, in-situ calibration
/ validation of satellite Earth Observation data,
and supply of data for development of state | of the art biogeochemical (process) models.
The project will innovate and combine state of
the art sensor technologies (microfabrication,
lab-on-chip, micro and calibration free electrochemical
sensors, multiparameter optodes and
multispectral optical sensors) in a modular and
configurable system easily usable across multiple
ocean and environmental platforms. Precompetitive
prototypes will be optimized for
scale up and commercialization including preparation
of data flow and data management architectures.
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These will be tested and demonstrated
on profiling floats, deep-sea observatories, autonomous underwater vehicles, and fishing
vessels. Specific objectives are the development
of integrated systems with sensors for pH, carbon
dioxide, carbon, alkalinity, oxygen, nutrients,
metals (iron and manganese) but also for coloured
dissolved organic matter, chlorophylls,
photopigments, primary production, organic
fluorophores, etc. These integrated systems will
be optimized for power consumption, chemical
usage and waste production. They will be resistant
to bio-fouling to facilitate long-term deployment
in the marine environment. The resulting
systems will be developed to provide near-market
systems; these will then be launched as
commercially available products. |
Activities of the project can be described as follows:
firstly, the project will focus on underpinning
sensors' technology, including power and
data management, development and testing
of novel sensing technologies and bio-fouling
approaches. Secondly, the project will deal with
the development of the sensors to the prototype
stage and cover the design of the sensors, the
testing and performance, as well as the production
and integration of the sensors. A specific
work package will also be dedicated to a sensor's
demonstration programme. |
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