Stones is the world’s deepest oil and gas project, operating 9,500 feet of water in an ultra-deep area of the US Gulf of Mexico. The floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) facility, which started production in 2016, connects to subsea infrastructure which produces oil and gas from reservoirs nearly 30,000 feet below sea level. The Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS)in collaboration with Shell, supports a pilot effort to convert an existing ocean mooring owned by Shell into the first long-term deep ocean observatory in the Gulf of Mexico. The collaboration, Stones Metocean Observatory Project (Stones MetObs), will provide important marine data to support scientific research and improve understanding of the Gulf of Mexico. The Stones MetObs Data Portal provides the infrastructure to view, investigate, and download data from the Stones MetObs.
Stones MetObs will include standard atmospheric data such as winds, air pressure, air temperature, and oceanographic data such as waves and currents. The Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) mounted on the buoy generates up to 170 readings per reporting period from a depth of 4 meters to a depth of 2,897 meters. The mooring is also equipped with an acoustic monitoring instrument, Autonomous Multichannel Acoustic Recorder (AMAR G4), that records ambient, anthropogenic, and marine mammal sound in the area. This data portal is part of a broader, long-term initiative NAS is currently developing called Understanding Gulf Ocean Systems (UGOS). UGOS is envisioned as a comprehensive, cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional research campaign to improve understanding of the various interacting physical, biological, and chemical processes at work in the Gulf of Mexico.