Craig Steinberg of AIMS heads up the Queensland and Northern Australia mooring sub facility consisting of four pairs of moorings located north to south along the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) and two National Reference Stations. Each pair has an outer mooring sitting on the continental slope (slope mooring) in water greater than 200m deep and an on-shelf mooring sitting on the continental shelf (shelf mooring) in shallower water around 30-70m deep.

The moorings hold a range of instrumentation including an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP), WetLabs Water Quality Meters that measure dissolved oxygen, fluorescence, turbidity, pressure (depth) in addition to conductivity, temperature, and depth. Three of the four shelf moorings are also planned to have a surface buoy to measure meteorological and radiation observations in real-time.

The objective is to observe the cross-shelf exchange of water between the Coral Sea and the GBR. The mooring design allows water moving along and onto the GBR to be measured by monitoring the southward flowing East Australian Current (EAC) and the northward Hiri western boundary current. Moorings in the southern GBR monitor the strength of currents related to upwelling events detectable on the Capricorn-Bunker Shelf, a supply of deep nutrient rich water to the reef. Craig summarises the current status as follows: “All mooring locations are populated with a subset of the final instrumentation, the challenge now is to complete the instrumentation packages and real-time delivery over the next few mooring deployment cruises.”

This sub-facility has installed one National Reference Mooring at the Yongala wreck, near Townsville and will install one in the near future off Darwin