Operation of the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office at UCSD/SIO, 2009-2013

University Of California-San Diego Scripps Inst Of Oceanography, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

The primary function of the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO is to bring together, verify, and correct content and format errors in the CTD, hydrographic, and tracer data used in large scale ocean carbon, global change, water mass, and circulation studies. The staff of the CCHDO consists of a team of data experts, documentation specialists, programmer-analysts, and student research assistants who assembles the data with relevant documentation, and carefully prepares them for dissemination and archive. In addition they work to promote appropriate methodology, applicable community standards, communications, and data compatibility. This renewal award will enable the CCHDO to continue its functions for CLIVAR hydrography, global ocean carbon hydrography, and similar programs which use high quality ocean profile data through 2013. The data handled with by the CCHDO are created by >100 data originators worldwide, sometimes with 5 or more PIs separately contributing to one bottle data file. The CCHDO makes it possible for all data users to cope with the temporal-, content-, and format-related file diversity these different originators engender. The CCHDO brings data together to a common content and readability standard, thereby greatly reducing the difficulties research and education data users encounter. A strong additional advantage is that the documentation associated with the data are collected, reorganized to a common standard (where possible), and preserved with the data. The CCHDO disseminates data via the internet (and on request on DVD). It also provides its public holdings to NODC/WDC-A for long-term archive and further distribution. Broader Impacts: With the merging, verification, content and format correction, and documentation carried out by the CCHDO, present-day and future US and international users of reference-quality CTD, routine hydrography, carbon, and tracer ocean profile data can easily use any of the data files written in the well documentated formats. This makes it much more reliable and affordable for research and education data users to import and use the data. Not only are the data easier to use, their quality and usefulness is much improved by the CCHDO's careful assembly of documentation with the data, helping to assure a service lifetime for the data far into the future, contributing to a broad range of studies of long-term ocean variability. The clean-up of the data and rewriting into netCDF formats also make the data much more straightforward to import into computer models. The data are a primary result of global-scale oceanography programs, and their broad dissemination enhances scientific and technological understanding. The CCHDO supports CLIVAR and carbon science programs, and is a data component of a global observing system for the physical climate/CO2 system. The CCHDO is hence part of a larger international effort to monitor the ocean's response to climate change. For example, these data are used to help quantify the uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean. The data are used to document long term trends in ocean warming, and heat and freshwater fluxes. The CCHDO puts into play the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and should be available to the community at large.