Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN)

Research Infrastructure (RI) labeled by the ICTS (Unique Scientific and Technological Infrastructure) Spanish National Roadmap.

PLOCAN is a multipurpose technical-scientific service infrastructure that provides support for research, technological development and innovation in the marine and maritime sectors, available to public and private users. PLOCAN offers both onshore and offshore experimental facilities and laboratories, operational throughout the whole year thanks to the Canary Islands excellent climatic conditions. PLOCAN also brings a broad experience in large national and EU marine/maritime projects.

As part of its activities, PLOCAN manages a variety of Observation Platforms in order to provide a continuous and real-time in-situ monitoring of the ocean. These platforms can be both fixed or mobile, providing information about the ocean surface and/or the water column. Different sensors are placed in PLOCAN Observation Platforms allowing access to physical, biochemical and climatological data.

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VEHICLES

PLOCAN manages a wide variety of vehicles, such as a series of Underwater Unmanned Vehicles (UUVs) profiler technologies, best known as Gliders, Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) and Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) .

PLOCAN provides a base for autonomous vehicles, having a dedicated control room to track and pilot them on real-time and dedicated laboratories and warehouses to prepare and store them. Besides, we support missions deploying customers vehicles.

DRIFTERS

The Global Drifter Program (GDP) is a NOAA (USA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) project which objectives are maintaining a global array of satellite-tracked surface drifting buoys and providing a data processing system for scientific use of these data. Those drifters offer in-situ observations of surface ocean currents and sea surface temperature.
Since 1998, first the Canary Islands Institute of Marine Sciences, and currently PLOCAN collaborates with this program launching drifting buoys at the ESTOC Oceanographic Station located 60 miles north of Gran Canaria. At present all data from these buoys are being processed to establish patterns in subsurface currents as well as their seasonality and variability in the environment of the Canary Archipelago. These data can be, also, integrated into predictive models of drift objects, in order to be able to advise in case of human losses or material in marine accidents.

CLIMATOLOGY

The dynamic map presented on this section shows a 40 year (1971-2012) ocean surface temperature climatology for the Macaronesian region. The data have been extracted from cruises records from the World Ocean Data Centre (WODC). From the original data, which are irregularly distributed in space and time, the average, maximum and minimum value of measured temperature are calculated and presented in squares with a length of 2.5 grades.

FIXED STATIONS

Various fixed platforms are built, deployed, mantained and managed by PLOCAN in order to obtain oceanographic and weather continuous time series from a single area in the ocean:

HC buoys: used to measured water quality, mainly surface temperature and presence/absence of hydrocarbons.

ODAS buoys: configurated wiht a mix of meteorological (ex. wind, atmospheric pressure, solar radiation, relative humidity, air temperature) and oceanographic sensors (ex. sea surface temperature, chlorophyll, turbidity, hydrocarbons, ocean currents)

Oceanographic stations: fixed structures placed inside harbours measuring parameters like temperatura, saliniy and dissolved oxygen.

Weather stations
Those fixed Observation Platforms are deployed in the 4 archipielagos (Canary Islands, Madeira, Açores and Cape Verde) which form the Macaronesian Area. Real time data can be checked in it dedicated portal.

HF Radar

The High Frequency (HF) Radar is a system capable of measuring the speed and direction of marine surface currents and significant wave height. A HF Radar emits electromagnetic waves in order to study the echo after reflection by the sea surface. Thanks to the Doppler effect, it can calculate the velocity of the current affecting the surface layer of the ocean.
The HF Radar operated by PLOCAN consists on two antennas, one located at PLOCAN building and another at Port of Las Palmas. It gives information about speed and direction of surface currents in the North- East part of Gran Canaria, reaching 40 km range and covering 90% of PLOCAN test-site area.