IMOS is designed to be a fully-integrated, national system, observing at ocean-basin and regional scales, and covering physical, chemical and biological variables.

IMOS Facilities, operated by ten different institutions within the National Innovation System, are funded to deploy equipment and deliver data streams for use by the entire Australian marine and climate science community and its international collaborators. 

The IMOS Ocean Portal allows marine and climate scientists and other users to discover and explore data streams coming from the Facilities.  The Ocean Portal has been operational since June 2009, with data streams now available from all Facilities - some in near-real time, and all as delayed-mode, quality-controlled data.  These data streams, long time-series that are ‘under construction’, represent the actual research infrastructure being created and developed by IMOS.

IMOS observations are guided by science planning undertaken collaboratively across the Australian marine and climate science community.  This is a large, diverse, dispersed community, and it makes sense to develop the science planning through a series of integrated Nodes – a ‘Bluewater and Climate’ Node focused on the open ocean, and five ‘Regional Nodes’ covering the continental shelf and coastal seas of Western Australia, Queensland, New South Wales, Southern Australia and Tasmania.  Leaders of the Nodes come together to form a national steering committee that oversees the whole process, and Node science plans are subjected to international peer review on a rolling basis to ensure the planned science is world-class.