Operation of the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office at UCSD/SIO, 2014-2018

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

Investigators

Abstract

Overview: The CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO) is the repository, assembly center, and distribution center for full-depth global ocean hydrographic, carbon, and tracer data. These data are a product of several international research programs (the World Ocean circulation experiment (WOCE), the CLImate VARiability and predictability program (CLIVAR), the International Ocean Carbon Coordination Project (IOCCP), the Global Ocean Ship-based Hydrographic Investigations Program (GO-SHIP)), and national research programs - past, present and to come. Whenever possible the CCHDO provides these data in three community formats: WHP-Exchange, netCDF, and WOCE. The CCHDO seeks to assure that these data and their associated documentation are prepared and made readily available for immediate research and education uses, and that these data have a long service life. The CCHDO?s primary window to the research community is via its web site <http://cchdo.ucsd.edu>. The CCHDO maintains ties with designated national data archives like NODC/WDC-A to see that the entirety of its public holdings is formally archived and up to date at the archive. Intellectual Merit: The CCHDO brings together, verifies, and corrects content and format errors in the hydrographic, and tracer data used in large scale ocean carbon, global change, water mass, and circulation studies. The team assembles the data with relevant documentation, and carefully prepares them for dissemination and archive. In addition they work to promote appropriate methodology, community standards, communications, and data compatibility. The CCHDO data are created by over 100 data originators worldwide, sometimes with 5 or more investigators 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. Broader Impacts: The CCHDO enhances research infrastructure, the broad dissemination of results, and the integration of research and education. While the CCHDO does not generate new data, it makes the data better and more usable, thus more far reaching and ultimately more scientifically and socially relevant. Via the CCHDO?s actions, present-day and future US and international users of these CTD, routine hydrography, ocean carbon, and tracer ocean profile data can easily use any of the data files written in the ASCII or netCDF exchange formats. This both reduces the personnel costs to data users to import and use data and also makes these data available to a much wider audience in the research, educational, and broader communities who do not employ data specialists. Moreover, the careful assembly of documentation with the data helps to assure a service lifetime for the data far into the future, contributing to a broad range of future studies of long-term ocean variability. The clean-up of the data and rewriting into accepted data formats also make the data much more straightforward to import into computer models. The CCHDO supports CLIVAR and carbon science programs, and is a data component of a global observing system for the physical climate and carbon dioxide system. The CCHDO is hence part of a larger international effort to monitor the ocean?s response to climate change. The CCHDO puts into play the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and should be available to the community at large.