Efforts on developing the technologies of abyssal cabled observatory in China

Cabled ocean observatory system that enables abundant power and broad bandwidth communication has attracted many scientists during the last decade. In order to build cabled ocean observatory system in China, Zhejiang University along with some other Chinese institutes are developing the technologies of cabled observatory suitable for coastal and abyssal ocean under the support of National High-Tech Research Program of China from 2004. In this paper, the efforts of the last five years on the development of the relative technologies are introduced, including the power, communication and timing. Serial tests and experiments were carried out in lab, coastal and deep sea to validate that the studied technologies and methods were suitable for a long term seafloor observation.