Planning and application of the Korea Ocean Gate Array (KOGA) program

Abstract

In late 2010, the Korea Hydrographic and Oceanographic Administration proposed a national monitoring project involving the deployment of 8 realtime ocean data buoys. The area occupied by the buoy-array, located south of the Ieodo Ocean Research Station, can be regarded as a kind of gateway to Korean waters with respect to warm currents and the shipping industry. The acronym for the project, KOGA (Korea Ocean Gate Array) was derived from this aspect. To ensure the success of the project, international cooperation with the neighboring countries of China and Japan is highly desirable. Once KOGA is successfully launched and the moored buoys start to produce data, the data will be applied to various areas such as data assimilation for operational oceanography, circulation dynamics, biogeochemical studies, satellite observations, and air-sea interactions. The aim of this paper is to provide suggestions for KOGA planning and applications.