- The State of the Ocean: A VENUS Perspective
- Saanich Inlet VIP State of the Ocean Plot
- Strait of Georgia East Node VIP State of the Ocean Plot
- Strait of Georgia Central Node VIP State of the Ocean Plot
- Strait of Georgia East Node Delta Dynamics Laboratory State of the Ocean Plot
- Data Usage Policy
- External Links
Monitoring the physical and biological oceanographic conditions and fishery resources of the Pacific Region is done semi-regularly by a number of government departments. The goal is to document and understand the natural variability of these ecosystems and how they respond to both natural and anthropogenic stresses. Since 2000, these reports have been published and made available to the public via the Department of Fisheries Ocean Status webpage. See the external links at the bottom of the page to preview DFO reports from the year 2000 onwards.
The VENUS coastal network, with cabled assets in both Saanich Inlet and the Strait of Georgia, is an ideal facility for monitoring both the state of the coastal ocean and for the detection of seasonal variations and climatic shifts as the time series are both continuous and of high temporal resolution. VENUS provides that first and only continuous records of ocean properties below the surface in British Columbia. The Saanich Inlet (SI) array includes a shore station at the Institute of Ocean Sciences and a 3 km cable to a Node at 100 metres depth (“SI” at 48° 39.0540’N 123° 29.2027’W). The Strait of Georgia (SoG) array consists of a shore station at the Iona Waste Water Treatment Plant, a 40 km cable, and two Nodes, one in the central southern strait at 300 metres depth (“SoG Central” at 49° 2.41’N 123° 25.53’W), and a second on the eastern flank at 170 metres depth (“SoG East” at 49° 2.52’N123° 19.06’W). At each VENUS Node there is a standard VENUS instrument platform (VIP) hosting a variety of oceanographic instruments including a CTD to measure temperature and salinity, an ADCP to measure currents, and an inverted echo-sounder to detect zooplankton.
VENUS State of the Ocean Data Products available on this page include both plots and numerical tables and are derived from the primary CTD sensors at each VENUS VIP site (see Instruments page). The data streams for each site are concatenated to provide a nearly continuous time series of data throughout the seasons that the VENUS array has been deployed at that site. Further processing to create the data products involves spike removal and hourly bin-averaging of data to produce “clean”, hourly means. The products are updated nightly with the previous day's data and are available as figures (PNG, PDF format) or as data in Matlab mat-files (v7), csv-delimited text file, ODV4 generic spreadsheet and netCDF file.
VENUS Reports for Previous Years
- 2011 VENUS perspective on the State of the Ocean
- 2010 VENUS perspective on the State of the Ocean
- 2009 VENUS perspective on the State of the Ocean
- 2008 VENUS perspective on the State of the Ocean.
Green: All data values in plot time period have passed QAQC tests.
Yellow: Some data values in plot time period have failed QAQC tests. These data are removed from the web plot but are available via the Download Data page. See the plot metadata for details.
Red: All data values in plot time period have failed QAQC tests. These data are removed from the web plot but are available via the Download Data page. See the plot metadata for details.
Grey: No QAQC tests are applied to this data.
Please see this note on Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC).
