OBS meaning in Academic & Science ?

An ocean-bottom seismometer (OBS) is a seismometer that is designed to record the earth motion under oceans and lakes from man-made sources and natural sources.

Sensors at the sea floor are used to observe acoustic and seismic events. Seismic and acoustic signals may be caused by different sources, by earthquakes and tremors as well as by artificial sources. Computing and analyzing the data yields information about the kind of source and, in case of natural seismic events, the geophysics and geology of the sea floor and the deeper crust. The deployment of OBS along a profile will give information about the deep structure of the Earth's crust and upper mantle in offshore areas. OBS may be equipped with a maximum of a three-component geophone in addition to a hydrophone, and thus it needs a capacity of more than 144 Mbytes, which would be the minimum for an adequate MCS profiling. In a typical survey, the instruments should be operational for several days (deployments can exceed 12 months), which requires a data storage capacity of more than 500 Mbyte. Other experiments, such as tomographic investigations within a 3D-survey or seismological monitoring, demand even larger capacities.