The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has constructed a coastal observatory off the south coast of the island of Martha's Vineyard. The Martha's Vineyard Coastal Observatory (MVCO) includes a permanent suit of subsea oceanographic and shore-based meteorological sensors. These core sensors will continuously monitor the marine environment by measuring a wide range of variables including wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, solar and IR radiation, precipitation, CO2, wave height and direction, currents, sea temperature, salinity, turbidity, and fluorescence.  The seafloor node and the meteorological mast will be connected by buried cables to a small unmanned onshore laboratory. This laboratory will provide essential data communication links to WHOI and the rest of the internet.
     Additional "guest" ports at the meteorological mast and at the subsea nodes are designed to allow researchers to plug in their own instruments and gain easy access to kWatts of power and Gbytes of bandwidth provided by the MVCO infrastructure.  These instruments can then be remotely monitored using a network based telemetry system.  This will provide scientists and engineers with the capability to operate long-term continuous experiments with real time data feedback in the highly dynamic coastal ocean environment. Experiments in air-sea interaction, sediment transport, beach erosion, wave studies, and predictive coastal modeling are underway.  More information on the MVCO can be found at the MVCO web site or summary article.
     During the CBLAST-Low experiment an additional cable will be run from the offshore node (located 1.5 km from shore in 12-m of water) out to the Air-Sea Interaction Tower (ASIT) that will be deployed 5 km from shore in 20 meters of water.  Additional information about the ASIT can be found by returning to the CBLAST-Low main page.