The Svalbard Underwater Observatory
The AWIPEV-COSYNA Svalbard Underwater Observatory was initiated in 2012 by installing a remote operated permanent ferrybox system and an underwater profiling sensor unit in Kongsjorden at N 78° 54.200 / E 11° 54.00 (WGS84), close to the Old Pier (Fig. 1)
The observatory comprise a land based FerryBox system (4HJena engineering) at the base of the pier (Fig. 2) and a profiling sensor unit under water (Fig. 3). Both, the base of the profiling sensor unit and the water inlet of the FerryBox are located about 40 m off the end of the "Old Pier" in 11 m water depth (+/- 1 m tide).
The FerryBox is equipped with multiple sensors for temperature, conductivity/salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll A (flourescence) and turbidity and was upgraded in 2015/2016 with additional sensors for pCO2, total alcalinity and pH (jointly operated by the AWI and its cooperation partner CNRS in Villefranche-sur-mer). The system is operated year round. Sampling intervall of most sensors is 1Hz, sampling intervall of the TA-analyser is 30 min.
The Underwater Unit is equipped with a CTD for temperature, conductivity/salinity, oxygen, chlorophyll A (flourescence), turbidity, PAR (Wetlab) and pH as well as custom made stereoscopic fish observatory (RemOs1) incl. a Webcam. This unit is fully remote controlled and can profile between 11m water depth and the surface. Additionally, an upward looking ADCP is positioned in 13m water depth (Teledyne, 1200 Hz). As the FerryBox, also the underwater unit is operated year round. The sampling intervall of the CTD and the PAR sensor is 1Hz (1 value per second), the ADCP saves one data ensemble every 20 sec. and the stereoscopic fish observatory saves one image pair every 30 min.The webcam is permanently online.
Data are automatically transferred every hour to the AWI Near-Realtime-Database (NRT) of the AWI computing center in Bremerhaven where they are shown as averages per hour in the AWI-dashboard for the AWIPEV-UWO for a first check. Data are then post-processed (including quality checks) depending on their use and finally stored as datasets in Pangaea.