OOICloud
The OOICloud project shares data from the Ocean Observatories Initiative with the scientific community, through an open platform that helps ocean researchers study the impacts of climate change.
Learn more about OOICloud
Challenge
More than a mile beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, CamHD delivers over 100 gigabytes of video data each day to shoreside servers. The scientific community was previously able to retrieve CamHD data through a basic web server, but the volume of data created long download times and required excessive disk space for storage. Original data file containers and video codecs further inhibited time-series scientific investigations.
Solutions
AI for Earth has partnered with Columbia University and Queens College to support the analysis of data from the Oceans Observatories Initiative (OOI). Paired with Pangeo’s big data analysis and cloud-based solutions from Microsoft Azure, OOICloud gives oceanographers, scientists and educational institutions access to vast datasets which will help improve our understanding and management of the oceans and help address climate change.

Views into a deep underwater volcano
OOICloud shares data and images from a high-definition video camera at the hydrothermal vent in the Axial Volcano, off the coast of Oregon on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. With this data now available on the Azure Cloud, scientists around the world can better understand deep oceans and address climate change.

How OOICloud works
OOI’s underwater camera captures video and uploads it to Azure Blob Storage via fibre optic cables spanning hundreds of miles. Pangeo makes large-scale analysis available to scientists, leveraging Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Analysing thousands of images now takes minutes rather than days.
How OOICloud uses Azure
- Azure Virtual Machines to serve user files and maintain workspaces
- Azure Kubernetes Service to facilitate Pangeo and Dask dynamic distributed workflows
- Azure Container Registry to store OOICloud Docker images
- Azure Blob Storage to store OOI data for scalable distributed access for scientific discovery

Empowering scientific collaboration with AI and open data
