THE TYPE OF PROBLEMS TO BE ASSESSED BY THE NEOS & CABLE-TIE NETWORK

"How is the earth's climate controlled and how is it going to change in response to human activities. We are woefully lacking of understanding of the details."

--Neptune Canada 

1) Human activities are changing the global carbon and nitrogen cycles.

2) Currently, one of the largest “unknowns” in global carbon cycle is the continental shelves. It is difficult to completely understand the C budget until we have information on whether the shelves are net sources or sinks for atmospheric carbon. The same problem is true for nitrogen, sulfur, and metals. The flux of all the elements drives the biology. The input of these elements is often through the terrestrial and atmosphere systems. The continental shelf is the sponge between the land, atmosphere, and deep ocean.

3) Understanding the land-deep ocean coupling through the continental shelves will be a key innovation allowing us to assess our current ideas atmosphere-land-ocean coupling. These issues are now hypothesized to be a key to understanding glacial-interglacial transitions.

Therefore we need to understand the importance of the shelf system. This needs to be done subsurface; OCEAN.US will provide the surface spatial perspective, which is inadequate to answer the question of net source/sink, material transformation and deposition. We need a regional shelf-wide ocean observation system.

(A) (B)

Figure A. The locations (red circles) of existing coastal ocean observatories along the Eastern seaboard. 
Figure B. Cable-Tie is based on the idea of taking advantage of an old trans-Atlantic cable, which has recently been retired.  The idea is to use the cable to link existing networks of coastal observatories. Yellow line: surface cable, Red dotted lines: AUV missions, Green circles: Data notes, and Red circles & Green triangles: existing coastal observatories.  The dotted line indicates proposed AUV Glider tracks which will fill in the spatial gaps in the Cable derived data.



Figure C. The combined proposed observatory network for the Eastern Seaboard combining Long range surface current radars (Pie slices), buoys, and the proposed Cable Tie system.