Overview of CSIRO oceanographic moorings

The CSIRO section that produces oceanographic moorings has undergone considerable growth in recent years. Moorings are designed, built and deployed by Ocean Sensor Deployment (OSD), which is composed of three teams, Deepwater, Coastal and Western Australia. Team members and facilities are located in Hobart in Tasmania, Perth in Western Australia and Brisbane in Queensland. The workload of OSD has increased dramatically and is set to more than double over the next three years. Growth is mostly being driven by funding from the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), which has also changed the way that OSD operates. Moorings are now often developed as on-going systems to collected time series data as opposed to sequential process studies. As the system grows this has a cumulative effect on the resources required for servicing the mooring arrays.