8.1 National Ocean Information System

The Department progressively strengthened the structure of National Ocean Information System (NOIS) Conceived and implemented in 1989. The NOIS serves as the national archive of a comprehensive set of marine data characterising the state and parameters of various oceanic and coastal domains, as a basic resource for planning and management of the wide variety of maritime and coastal zone activities. This national system has been so designed as to be highly cost-effective by utilising the existing capabilities and in some cases infrastructural facilities of a number of specialised institutions and agencies and integrating them into a synergistic network. It comprises 13 Marine Data Centres, each backed up by specialised expertise for structuring and quality appraisal of the respective data set, to be linked by satellite to form a truly interactive system. The Centres are:

Marine Geodata Centre, Geological Survey of India, Calcutta for geological parameters.

KD Malviya Institute of Petroleum Exploration, Dehradun for seismic, magnetic and gravity data

National Institute of Oceanography, Goa for physical, chemical and biological oceanography.

Regional Centre, National Institute of Oceanography, Bombay for marine pollution.

Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi for marine fisheries.

Central Salt & Marine Chemicals Research Institute, Bhavnagar, for marine algae and marine chemicals.

India Meteorological Department, Pune for marine meteorology .

Central Drug Research Institute, Lucknow for drugs from the sea.

National Remote Sensing Agency, Hyderabad for coastal and ocean related marine remote sensing data

Institute for Ocean Management, Anna University, Madras for coastal zone data.

Survey of India, Dehradun for tide gauge data.

Naval Hydrographic Office, Dehradun for bathymetry data.

Fishery Survey of India, Bombay.

These Marine Data Centres are charged with the responsibility of developing appropriate formats, mechanisms and. structures for acquisition, processing, quality appraisal and archiving of their respective data sets as well as effective mechanisms for easy retrieval, and synergistic development of the entire NOIS. These Centres will also evolve workable strategies towards making their data sets progressively more complete by making use of other ocean going vessels of the Government,

During the year 1991-92 formats for storing and dissemination of data were finalised. In addition, basic and operational facilities at Regional Centre, Bombay to ensure storage, processing and dissemination of all data relating to marine pollution and additional facilities in the Geological Survey of India for operationalisation of the data exchange programme were also created.

8.2 Ships and Instrumentation

The two sea-going research vessels Sagar Kanya and Sagar Sampada now in their ninth year have done much to stimulate scientific exploration of the oceanic resources and environment of the country's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), besides supporting exploration of deep seabed nodules and EEZ of some friendly countries. Owing to pressure on the limited research vessels to meet the competing demands made by diverse national interests a special exercise was undertaken to examine the possibility of expanding the research and data base by utilising available space and equipment of all sea going vessels operated under the Supervision of the Central Government Departments, agencies and institutions. It was also decided to recommission the research vessel Gaveshani belonging to the CSIR. Financial support was provided for this purpose and the vessel was recommissioned on 8 July 1991. Further steps were taken to formulate the research cruises to optimise available ship facilities.

8.3 Integrated Data Acquisition System

The National Institute of Oceanography was entrusted with the development of an Integrated Data Acquisition System with fully automated data acquisition and processing capability on board ship. It consists of a cluster of personal computers connected together by a Local Area Network. The computers dedicated for data acquisition acquire data from one or more equipment connected to it. The navigation computer system serves as the central node in the network, which receives data from all other computers and then broadcasts integrated information back onto the network. Thus data acquired by anyone computer can be monitored from any other computer on the network. Data is stored on local disk as well as on the central file server .

The system has been implemented totally with indigenous technology and tested on board Sagar Sampada during cruise 87 from 15 to 28 March 1991 and subsequently in August 1991 the system was installed on RV Gaveshani and is now in use.