Submarine cables for ocean/climate monitoring and disaster warning: science, engineering, business and law

The Workshop on Submarine Cables for Ocean/Climate Monitoring and Disaster Warning: Science, Engineering, Business and Law will aim at encouraging the development of new technologies and standards and will explore business opportunities for telecommunication companies to become active players in monitoring climate change.

The conference explains how submarine cables can be used as a real-time global network to monitor climate change and to provide tsunami warnings. Future generations of cables and associated components could have the capacity to directly measure climate variables, such as water temperature, salinity and pressure on the ocean floor. All this could be achieved over long periods of time at low cost. On of the sessions aims at comparing costs and benefits of different warning systems.

Despite a wide range of tools to monitor oceans, oceanographers cannot measure water variables at the sea floor. The workshop highlights how new and old submarine telecommunication cables could fill this gap.