IMOS - ANMN Queensland and Northern Australia (QLD) Mooring Sub-Facility

The Queensland and Northern Australia Mooring Sub-Facility is part of the Australian National Mooring Network (ANMN).

This sub-facility consists of array moorings located in the northern tropics along the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) for Q-IMOS in the east and in the north western parts of Australia for the WAIMOS nodes. The mooring arrays provide near real time and delayed mode observations from oceanographic moorings comprising physical (temperature, salinity, sea level and currents) and on most moorings, water quality measurements (turbidity, fluorescence, dissolved oxygen).

The GBR array (extends an earlier long term observing program) is located along the outer Great Barrier Reef in order to monitor the Western Boundary currents of the Coral Sea comprising the poleward East Australian Current (EAC) and the equator-ward Gulf of Papua Current. Four mooring pairs consist of a continental slope mooring in 70 to 300m of water and its partner on the outer continental shelf within the reef matrix in depths of 30 to 70m. The array is designed to detect any changes in circulation, temperature response, mixed layer depth and ocean-shelf exchanges.

WAIMOS observations in the north west of Australia commenced in June 2010 with the roll out of 4 moorings from Joseph Bonaparte Gulf to the Timor slope. These continental shelf moorings complement a deep water array monitoring the Indonesian Throughflow in the Timor Tough and Ombai Strait operated by the IMOS ABOS facility. In early 2012 two more arrays were added off the Kimberley and Pilbara continental shelf regions (these were discontinued in August 2014). The arrays are looking to monitor boundary currents such as the Holloway and Leeuwin Currents. Cross-shelf exchanges are also observed in these high energy macro-tidal and internal wave dominated shelves.

In 2013 in partnership with the Darwin Port Corp, the Northern Territory Government a new real time mooring was located in Beagle Gulf. The Palm Passage mooring on the GBR was upgraded to near-real-time in February 2013.