OOI Regional Cabled Array Multi-Span DAS Experiment Results Published
The groundbreaking multi-span distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) experiment on the U.S. National Science Foundation Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) Regional Cabled Array (RCA) has been documented in a preprint at ESS Open Archive, detailing the successful extension of sensing across the full length of submarine fiber optic cables .
Key Technical Details:
Northern cable: ~480 km reaching Axial Seamount
Southern cable: ~350 km crossing the continental shelf onto the Juan de Fuca Plate
Nokia Bell Labs system: Overcomes signal loss at optical repeaters using high-loss loopback couplers
Usable data: 165 km on northern cable, 275 km on southern cable after applying spatial masks
Data Accessibility:
Low sample rate (~8 Hz) data are now available, including 3.9 TB of Nokia multi-span DAS data and 1.2 TB of OptoDAS data from the southern cable, along with documentation and tools for access and analysis .
"The Regional Cabled Array was designed to support innovation, and this project is a great example of how we can expand its capabilities in new and exciting ways," said Deb Kelley, Director of OOI's Regional Cabled Array .
