See also
- Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (GEOSECS)
- Global Ocean Data Analysis Project (GLODAP)
- Ocean heat content
- World Ocean Atlas (WOA)
- World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE)
The World Ocean Database Project, or WOD, is a project established by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC). The project leader was Sydney Levitus, who was also director of the International Council for Science (ICSU) World Data Center (WDC) for Oceanography, Silver Spring. [1] Sydney Levitus retired in 2013. [2] In recognition of the success of the IOC Global Oceanographic Data Archaeological and Rescue Project (GODAR project), a proposal was presented at the 16th Session of the Committee on International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE), which was held in Lisbon, Portugal, in October–November 2000, to establish the World Ocean Database Project. This project is intended to stimulate international exchange of modern oceanographic data and encourage the development of regional oceanographic databases as well as the implementation of regional quality control procedures. This new Project was endorsed by the IODE at the conclusion of the Portugal meeting, and the IOC subsequently approved this project in June 2001.
The World Ocean Database represents the world’s largest collection of ocean profile-plankton data available internationally without restriction. Data comes from the: (a) Sixty-five National Oceanographic Data Centers and nine Designated National Agencies (DNAs) (in Croatia, Finland, Georgia, Malaysia, Romania, Senegal, Sweden, Tanzania, and Ukraine), (b) International Ocean Observing Projects such as the completed World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and Joint Global Ocean Flux Study (JGOFS), as well as currently active programs such as CLIVAR and Argo, (c) International Ocean Data Management Projects such as the IOC/IODE Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue Project (GODAR), and (d) Real-time Ocean Observing Systems such as the IOC/IODE Global Temperature-Salinity Profile Project (GTSPP). All ocean data acquired by WDC Silver Spring – USA are considered as part of the WDC archive and are freely available as public domain data.
The World Ocean Database was first released in 1994 [3] and updates have been released approximately every four years, 1998, [4] 2001, [5] and 2005. [6] The most recent World Ocean Database series, WOD09, was released in September 2009. [7] The WOD09 has more than 9 million temperature profiles and 3.6 million salinity profiles. The table shows a comparison of the number of stations by instrument type in WOD09 with previous NODC/WDC global ocean databases.
| Instrument Type | NODC (1974) [8] | NODC (1991) [9] | WOA94 | WOD98 | WOD01 | WOD05 | WOD09 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OSD [10] | 425,000 | 783,912 | 1,194,407 | 1,373,440 | 2,121,042 | 2,258,437 | 2,541,298 |
| CTD [11] | na | 66,450 | 89,000 | 189,555 | 311,943 | 443,953 | 641,845 |
| MBT [12] | 775,000 | 980,377 | 1,922,170 | 2,077,200 | 2,376,206 | 2,421,940 | 2,426,749 |
| XBT | 290,000 | 704,424 | 1,281,942 | 1,537,203 | 1,743,590 | 1,930,413 | 2,104,490 |
| MRB | na | na | na | 107,715 | 297,936 | 445,371 | 566,544 |
| DRB | na | na | na | na | 50,549 | 108,564 | 121,828 |
| PFL | na | na | na | na | 22,637 | 168,988 | 547,985 |
| UOR | na | na | na | na | 37,645 | 46,699 | 88,190 |
| APB | na | na | na | na | 75,665 | 75,665 | 88,583 |
| GLD | na | na | na | na | na | 338 | 5,857 |
| Total Stations | 1,490,000 | 2,535,163 | 4,487,519 | 5,285,113 | 7,037,213 | 7,900,368 | 9,133,369 |
| Plankton | na | na | na | 83,650 | 142,900 | 150,250 | 218,695 |
| SUR [13] | na | na | na | na | 4,743 | 9,178 | 9,178 |
Ocean profile, plankton data, and metadata are available in the World Ocean Database for 29 depth-dependent variables (physical and biochemical) and 11 instruments types: Ocean Station Data (OSD), Mechanical Bathythermograph (MBT), Expendable Bathythermograph (XBT), Conductivity, Temperature, Depth (CTD), Undulating Oceanographic Recorder (UOR), Profiling Float (PFL), Moored Buoy (MRB), Drifting Buoy (DRB), Gliders (GLD), Autonomous Pinniped Bathythermograph (APB).
The data in the World Ocean Database are made available through the online search and retrieval system known as WODselect. The World Ocean Atlas (WOAselect) series is a set of gridded (1° grid), climatological, objectively analyzed fields of the variables in the World Ocean Database. The WOAselect is a selection tool by which the user can designate a geographic area, depth, and oceanographic variable to view climatological means or related statistics for a given variable at the requested depth for the requested geographic area.
The Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC/UNESCO) was established by resolution 2.31 adopted by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It first met in Paris at UNESCO Headquarters from 19 to 27 October 1961. Initially, 40 States became members of the commission. The IOC assists governments to address their individual and collective ocean and coastal management needs, through the sharing of knowledge, information and technology as well as through the co-ordination of programs and building capacity in ocean and coastal research, observations and services.
The National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) was one of the national environmental data centers operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce. The main NODC facility was located in Silver Spring, Maryland, and consisted of five divisions. The NODC also had field offices collocated with major government or academic oceanographic laboratories in Stennis Space Center, MS; Miami, FL; La Jolla, San Diego, California; Seattle, WA; Austin, Texas; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; and Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2015, NODC was merged with the National Climatic Data Center and the National Geophysical Data Center into the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
The Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue Project, or GODAR Project was established to increase the volume of historical oceanographic data available to climate change and other researchers. The project attempts to locate ocean profile and plankton data sets not yet in digital form, digitizes these data, and ensures their submission to national data centers and the World Data Center system (WDC). In addition, data on electronic media that are at risk of loss due to media degradation are also candidates for rescue.
The Global Temperature and Salinity Profile Programme (GTSPP) is a cooperative international project that seeks to develop and maintain a global ocean Temperature-Salinity resource with up-to-date and high quality data.
The bathythermograph, or BT, also known as the Mechanical Bathythermograph, or MBT; is a device that holds a temperature sensor and a transducer to detect changes in water temperature versus depth down to a depth of approximately 285 meters. Lowered by a small winch on the ship into the water, the BT records pressure and temperature changes on a coated glass slide as it is dropped nearly freely through the water. While the instrument is being dropped, the wire is paid out until it reaches a predetermined depth, then a brake is applied and the BT is drawn back to the surface. Because the pressure is a function of depth, temperature measurements can be correlated with the depth at which they are recorded.
Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) is the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) core project responsible for understanding how global change will affect the abundance, diversity and productivity of marine populations. The programme was initiated by SCOR and the IOC of UNESCO in 1991, to understand how global change will affect the abundance, diversity and productivity of marine populations comprising a major component of oceanic ecosystems.
The World Ocean Atlas (WOA) is a data product of the Ocean Climate Laboratory of the National Oceanographic Data Center (U.S.). The WOA consists of a climatology of fields of in situ ocean properties for the World Ocean. It was first produced in 1994, with later editions at roughly four year intervals in 1998, 2001, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2018, and 2023.
The Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) is a global system for sustained observations of the ocean comprising the oceanographic component of the Global Earth Observing System of Systems (GEOSS). GOOS is administrated by the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), and joins the Global Climate Observing System, GCOS, and Global Terrestrial Observing System, GTOS, as fundamental building blocks of the GEOSS.
The following are considered ocean essential climate variables (ECVs) by the Ocean Observations Panel for Climate (OOPC) that are currently feasible with current observational systems.
Ocean reanalysis is a method of combining historical ocean observations with a general ocean model driven by historical estimates of surface winds, heat, and freshwater, by way of a data assimilation algorithm to reconstruct historical changes in the state of the ocean.
EXPOCODE, or the "expedition code", is a unique alphanumeric identifier defined by the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) of the US. The code defines a standard nomenclature for cruise labels of research vessels and intends to avoid confusion in oceanographic data management.
CTD stands for conductivity, temperature, and depth. A CTD instrument is an oceanography sonde used to measure the electrical conductivity, temperature, and pressure of seawater. The pressure is closely related to depth. Conductivity is used to determine salinity.
The Flanders Marine Institute provides a focal point for marine scientific research in Flanders, northern Belgium.
CORA is a global oceanographic temperature and salinity dataset produced and maintained by the French institute IFREMER. Most of those data are real-time data coming from different types of platforms such as research vessels, profilers, underwater gliders, drifting buoys, moored buoys, sea mammals and ships of opportunity.
SeaDataNet is an international project of oceanography. Its main goal is to enable the scientific community to access historical datasets owned by national data centers.
The neutral density or empirical neutral density is a density variable used in oceanography, introduced in 1997 by David R. Jackett and Trevor McDougall. It is a function of the three state variables and the geographical location. It has the typical units of density (M/V). Isosurfaces of form “neutral density surfaces”, which are closely aligned with the "neutral tangent plane". It is widely believed, although this has yet to be rigorously proven, that the flow in the deep ocean is almost entirely aligned with the neutral tangent plane, and strong lateral mixing occurs along this plane vs weak mixing across this plane . These surfaces are widely used in water mass analyses. Neutral density is a density variable that depends on the particular state of the ocean, and hence is also a function of time, though this is often ignored. In practice, its construction from a given hydrographic dataset is achieved by means of a computational code, that contains the computational algorithm developed by Jackett and McDougall. Use of this code is currently restricted to the present day ocean.
The Simple Ocean Data Assimilation (SODA) analysis is an oceanic reanalysis data set consisting of gridded state variables for the global ocean, as well as several derived fields. SODA was developed in the 1990s as a collaborative project between the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science at the University of Maryland and the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University with the goal of providing an improved estimate of ocean state from those based solely on observations or numerical simulations. Since its first release there have been several updates, the most recent of which extends from 1958 to 2008, as well as a “beta release” of a long-term reanalysis for 1871–2008.
The Ninfe class of survey vessels consists of two catamaran hulls operated by the Marina Militare Italiana.
The Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), formerly Ocean Biogeographic Information System, is a web-based access point to information about the distribution and abundance of living species in the ocean. It was developed as the information management component of the ten year Census of Marine Life (CoML) (2001-2010), but is not limited to CoML-derived data, and aims to provide an integrated view of all marine biodiversity data that may be made available to it on an open access basis by respective data custodians. According to its web site as at July 2018, OBIS "is a global open-access data and information clearing-house on marine biodiversity for science, conservation and sustainable development." 8 specific objectives are listed in the OBIS site, of which the leading item is to "Provide [the] world's largest scientific knowledge base on the diversity, distribution and abundance of all marine organisms in an integrated and standardized format".
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