New Sensors, New Solutions

The UK’s ocean science capability is taking a major step forward as the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) adapts its data systems to support a new generation of advanced marine sensors deployed on autonomous platforms.

Funded through the Future Marine Research Infrastructure (FMRI) programme, the Accelerating Adoption of Sensor Innovation (AASI) project is helping fast-track cutting-edge ocean sensors onto marine autonomous systems.

Ahead of today’s European Global Ocean Observing System (EuroGOOS) International Conference in Cyprus, FMRI caught up with Jak Jones, Marine Data Manager from the British Oceanographic Data Centre, to hear how it is transforming the digital infrastructure behind autonomous ocean science. 

Hello Jak, and thanks for speaking to us today. First up, can you tell us a little about BODC and your role there?

Sure. BODC is the UK’s National Oceanographic Data Centre and our role is to manage, safeguard and make accessible marine science data collected by the UK research community.

The data we manage supports everything from understanding coastal flooding risks to tracking long-term climate change impacts. As ocean observing technology evolves, we also have to ensure the data systems behind it evolve too.

My role focuses on helping develop and adapt those systems so they can support new technologies and make sure researchers can continue accessing high-quality ocean data quickly and reliably.

You’re presenting your work with AASI at the EuroGOOS conference today, but before we get into the technical side, can you explain what the AASI programme is?

Absolutely. AASI stands for the Accelerating Adoption of Sensor Innovation programme, which is a £4 million, three-year proof-of-concept project funded through the Future Marine Research Infrastructure (FMRI) programme.

It aims to demonstrate that innovative marine sensors can be rapidly developed, integrated and deployed on Marine Autonomous Systems for science applications.

The UK is already a world leader in marine autonomy, but to maintain that leadership we need faster ways of adopting emerging sensor technologies, and AASI is helping create that innovation pipeline.

What do you hope people will remember from your poster?

The main message is that innovation in ocean science is not just about developing new sensors, it’s also about building the digital infrastructure needed to support them.

We’re now seeing a new generation of autonomous platforms collecting increasingly sophisticated environmental measurements. That creates huge opportunities for ocean science, but also challenges for data management.

What we’re demonstrating is that BODC can rapidly adapt its end-to-end systems to support these new technologies, making sure the data remains accessible, interoperable and usable in near real-time.

What kinds of sensors are being developed through AASI?

The programme focuses particularly on biogeochemical sensors - instruments that measure nutrients and chemicals in the ocean. Traditionally these kinds of measurements were mostly limited to large research ships, but miniaturised low-power sensors are now opening up entirely new possibilities for autonomous platforms.

So how does this new sensor development create a challenge for BODC?

Historically, many oceanographic instruments produced data in fairly structured and standardised formats. These newer sensors are much more diverse.

Some produce completely new types of measurements, while others output data in new formats that our systems were not originally designed to ingest.

That means we’ve had to significantly evolve our processing pipelines and metadata systems so the data can still be standardised, quality controlled and delivered to researchers in community formats such as OceanGliders.

How have you adapted the systems to deal with that?

A major part of the work has involved upgrading our end-to-end processing chains so they can ingest and process these new file types.

One of the key developments has been enhancements to our Platform Agnostic Metadata System, or PAMS. This allows us to dynamically map generic sensor outputs to standardised scientific parameters on a deployment-by-deployment basis.

We’re also linking the data to internationally recognised vocabularies through the NERC Vocabulary Server, which ensures the datasets remain interoperable and machine-readable.

That flexibility is really important because autonomous oceanography is developing extremely quickly, and we need systems that can evolve alongside it.

What impact will this have for researchers?

The biggest impact is speed and accessibility.

Researchers will be able to receive high-quality data from novel sensors in near real-time, even as the technology continues to evolve. That supports faster scientific analysis and better operational decision-making during deployments.

More broadly, it helps ensure autonomous platforms can increasingly take on measurements that previously required expensive ship time, allowing us to observe the ocean more efficiently and at much larger scales.

What are the next steps for the project?

There’s still a lot of exciting work underway.

At the National Oceanography Centre, teams are developing a new application that will act as a “one-stop shop” for scientists to track deployments, access datasets and support operational decision-making in real time.

We’re also developing automated processing pipelines for full-resolution datasets, improving quality control workflows, and looking at how we capture provenance metadata so users can clearly understand how datasets have been processed.

All of this helps build a much more connected and scalable digital ecosystem for autonomous ocean science.

Finally, why is this kind of work important beyond the research community?

Better ocean observations ultimately benefit everyone.

The ocean plays a critical role in climate regulation, weather systems, biodiversity and coastal resilience. The more effectively we can observe and understand it, the better informed society can be when responding to environmental and climate challenges.

Projects like AASI show that investment in both sensing technology and digital infrastructure is essential if we want to unlock the full value of next-generation ocean science.