Two-Million-Liter Tank Expands the Boundaries of Marine Technology Innovation: National Resource Available for Advancing Marine Science

With one small move across a street, NOAA Fisheries, our nation's steward of marine ecosystems, made a giant leap into the future of ocean science and technology development. The new Southwest Fisheries Science Center facility in La Jolla, California, houses dozens of interdisciplinary research and engineering groups and features a world-class Ocean Technology Development Tank that expands the possibilities for advancing marine industry and science. This 20 × 10 × 10-meter, two-million-liter, freshwater or seawater “Tech Tank” is clear, quiet, and large enough to calibrate and test a wide variety of sensitive instruments with minimal boundary effects. The tank's temperature, salinity, and circulation can be made to mimic the broad range of water conditions encountered in the field, its water conditioning system greatly mitigates microbubbles and turbidity, and it can accommodate live marine animals. This unique combination of features opens doors to efficient engineering and scientific experimentation. The Tech Tank, supported by scientists and engineers and co-located with other state-of-the-art laboratory facilities, is a unique national resource for marine research and development and a catalyst for government, academic, and industry partnerships. The broad range of new possibilities is exemplified by multiple recent collaborative developments of acoustic and optical sensors and sensor platforms that effectively expand the boundaries of oceanic sampling, particularly near the sea surface, seabed, and seashore, to more efficiently and accurately monitor large marine ecosystems.