Achieving a thorough understanding of major physical, biological, chemical, and geological processes in the world oceans is a major challenge of the 21st century in particular against the background of climate change and the need to establish early warning systems for geo-hazard mitigation

In order to accomplish these goals international programmes are running worldwide to establish networks of ocean observatories, to measure multi-disciplinary parameters over long intervals (> 1 year) continuously on the seafloor and in the water column.

In Europe, the scientific community, supported by the European Commission, is presently engaged in the construction of EMSO, the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor Observatory research infrastructure and through the ESONET- Network of Excellence projects. In the US the NSF Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is underway and observatory design and construction has begun based on the program's science goals. As part of an invited lecture essential elements like pilot experiments, including Observing System Simulation Experiments (OSSE,) to explore practical designs will be described.

This session solicits contributions covering both technical and scientific topics related to consolidated activities, experiments, trials and tests with ocean observatories to provide perspectives on the upcoming multidisciplinary infrastructures. Contribution on monitoring instruments and strategies addressing aspects of basic and applied research, interoperability and networking of instruments into larger infrastructures, data processing, assimilation and dissemination are encouraged.

This session will also function as a community forum for presentations on new observational capabilities, novel measurement strategies and new research directions in the ocean observatory sciences.

Solicited speakers: Nadia Pinardi, University of Bologna,Ialy and John Orcutt, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, USA.