The Exploratorium’s Bay Observatory Wired Pier has been honored by the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC) as the recipient of the 2014 Innovations in Networking Award for High-Performance Research Applications.
In designing its new bayside location at Piers 15 and 17, the Exploratorium created the Bay Observatory Wired Pier and included state-of-the-art sensors and scientific instruments to provide layers of observable phenomena and environmental information about the local landscape and San Francisco Bay. These scientific instruments, attached to Pier 15, the Exploratorium roof, and placed in the Bay, provide live data in real time. A growing data archive allows assessment of short and long-term changes, from recent weather history to seasonal phytoplankton blooms.
Inside the Exploratorium Bay Observatory is the Wired Pier station and Hyper-media Wall composed of real-time data and data visualizations, imagery and video streams from remote research locations, satellite images, and real-time environmental conditions and news. These oceanographic and atmospheric instruments allow scientists, museum educators, and visitors to track ever-changing bay and ocean environments over time as well as suggest the ways predictive models are validated from sensor data.
Wired Pier allows the Exploratorium to be a research site and data collector for scientists who study the Bay. Scientists from the SFSU Romberg-Tiburon Center, UC Berkeley, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are contributing expertise and instruments to the Wired Pier and incorporating the data into their regional and national observation networks. The Wired Pier’s high bandwidth connection to CENIC’s California Research & Education Network (CalREN) offers a unique opportunity for scientists and research institutions to collaborate with the Exploratorium to understand the confluence of the ocean and estuary environments, a little known and critical relationship. Multiple research institutions are actively engaged with the Exploratorium and Wired Pier, both in California and beyond.
Innovations in Networking Awards are given annually by CENIC to highlight exemplary innovations which leverage ultra high-bandwidth networking, particularly where those innovations have the potential to revolutionize the ways in which instruction and research are conducted or where they further the deployment of broadband in underserved areas.
Related blog posts
Network Traffic Analysis Shows Changing Activity Patterns During COVID-19 Pandemic
Even as campuses, schools, libraries, and cultural institutions have closed amid stay-at-home orders, CENIC’s networks have remained a vital part of the Internet ecosystem for online learning and community engagement, remote access to research data and specialized computing facilities, academic medicine and clinical care, and work-from-home operations.
Understanding Network Impacts of Increased Online Learning
While COVID-19 is creating unprecedented uncertainty, Research and Education Networks such as CENIC’s CalREN will play an important role in supporting our educational institutions as they increasingly move to online learning. CENIC has prepared this information as a resource for members who have moved to, or are contemplating moving to, online instruction.
