How stable is the seafloor boundary layer over time?
Ocean Networks Canada has recorded multi-year time series of oceanographic core data (temperature, density/salinity, oxygen, pressure) from the seafloor across the observatories that can be statistically analyzed for site characterization purposes. The seafloor locations reach from inshore shallow sites to offshore coastal, continental shelf and slope and ocean basin deep sea sites. The statistical analysis involves finding the means, extreme highs and lows, and standard deviations, for days, seasons or over entire years. Furthermore, it is not yet clear whether there are any long-term trends in the data that are possibly induced by climate change (ocean warming, more storms, stronger currents) or tectonic deformation (seafloor uplift or subsidence). The result will be a series of site characterizations, allowing other observatory researchers to take into account the stability or instability of the conditions near their special scientific Ocean Networks Canada experiments.
Oceanographic data also correlate with each other (e.g., salinity with temperature). The second part of this project is to cross-correlate various datasets and derive obvious as well as hidden dependencies: e.g., delays in response time depending on depth or other parameters. Additional data sets may be in the form of wind, daylight, or rain, available from offshore buoys or from land. These secondary observations will help to extrapolate the site-specific findings to un-monitored sites as well as help predict oceanographic changes from other observations or models.