Monitoring the Oceans with SMART and DAS Sensors on Submarine Cables

The oceans host essential information to understand climate change (sea level rise, ocean warming) and natural hazards (tsunamis, earthquakes) but monitoring them is difficult and costly. Current initiatives aim at leveraging the millions of kilometers of submarine telecommunication fiber optic cables to enable worlwide real-time observation of the oceans at modest incremental costs. A Joint Task Force (JTF) sponsored by three United Nations agencies leads the initiative to realize Science Monitoring And Reliable Telecommunications (SMART) Cables, which integrate sensors into undersea telecommunications cables to measure seafloor temperature, pressure and seismic acceleration. Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) is a complementary technology that converts the fiber optic cable itself into a dense array of tens of thousands of vibration and temperature sensors, up to 150 km from the coast. This new generation of sensors will provide fundamental ocean data to adequately model and understand climate change processes, and to improve the speed and reliability of global tsunami and earthquake warning systems, without interfering with telecommunicatons. Moreover, these sensors can contribute to monitor other signals of interest, such as ship traffic and marine mammals.