Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies

Abstract: Research vessels supported by NSF are critical platforms contributing to academic oceanographic research in the US. The “underway” data sets obtained from the continuously operating geophysical, water column, and meteorological sensors aboard these vessels provide characterization of basic environmental conditions for the oceans and are of high scientific value for building global syntheses, climatologies, and historical time series of ocean properties (e.g the World Ocean Atlas, the GMRT bathymetric synthesis, ICOADS). The Rolling deck to Repository program (www.rvdata.us) provides a central shore-side data gateway that ensures the basic documentation, assessment and submission of all environmental data from ship operators to the NOAA long-term archives for these data.
R2R provides a set of data services for the oceanographic research community, including: publishing an online, searchable and browsable master cruise catalog, supported by cruise and data set DOIs; organizing, archiving, and disseminating original underway data and documents; assessing data quality on select data types; creating select post-field data products; and supporting at-sea event logging.
In this presentation we will discuss new developments in R2R data services and challenges associated with ship-based data management. A significant challenge is the dramatic increase in data volumes associated with new sensors (e.g. the EK80 Sonar systems) whereby individual cruise distributions can be several terabytes. Ship operators, R2R and NCEI must design a way to move and store these growing volumes. R2R is also working to make information more accessible and complete. A new website has been launched along with API web services that allow users to find and use data more easily. R2R is working to improve device metadata, including working to identify the time sources for all environmental sensors to support accurate comparison and merging of data sets.

Abstract: Since 2005, the Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System (SAMOS) initiative has been collecting, quality-evaluating, distributing, and archiving underway navigational, meteorological, and oceanographic observations from research vessels. Herein we describe the procedures for acquiring ship and instrumental metadata and the one-minute interval observations from 44 research vessels that have contributed to the SAMOS initiative from 2005 to 2017. The overall data processing workflow and quality control procedures are documented along with data file formats and version control procedures. The SAMOS data are disseminated to the user community via web, FTP, and Thematic Real-time Environmental Distributed Data Services from both the Marine Data Center at the Florida State University and the National Centers for Environmental Information, which serves as the long-term archive for the SAMOS initiative. They have been used to address topics ranging from air-sea interaction studies, the calibration, evaluation, and development of satellite observational products, the evaluation of numerical atmospheric and ocean models, and the development of new tools and techniques for geospatial data analysis in the informatics community. Maps provide users the geospatial coverage within the SAMOS dataset, with a focus on the Essential Climate/Ocean Variables, and recommendations are made regarding which versions of the dataset should be accessed by different user communities.