The European operational oceanography data exchange and the Marine In situ Collaboration
Governmental agencies and research institutes are managing physical oceanography observation systems and take care of the first level of data processing for their own applications. An organisation collects, controls and distributes data in principle according to its own rules. However the development of Operational Oceanography at regional and global scales involves major investments which are difficult to be made by a single country. Active cooperation has thus always been a key issue for the development of the Global Ocean Observation System (GOOS) towards the development of a global ocean observing system truly responsive to the needs of end users, able to mitigate mounting pressures on the ocean and enable resilient and sustainable blue economies. GOOS is organized in Regional Alliance (GRA), GRAs are particularly important for incorporating both coastal and open ocean observations, and for engaging with the users of operational services and the beneficiaries of marine ecosystem health.
The European component of the GOOS is EuroGOOS that serves 46 members and supporting five regional systems in Europe. EuroGOOS working groups, networks of observing platforms (task teams), and regional systems (ROOS), provide fora for cooperation, unlock quality marine data and deliver common strategies, priorities and standards towards the European Marine Services. EuroGOOS acts as a pillar for streamlining the operational data flow towards the Copernicus Marine Service (In Situ TAC) and EMODnet Physics.
The Copernicus Marine Service In Situ Thematic Assembly Center is a component of the Copernicus Marine Service and it gathers and bundles the in situ observations from the EuroGOOS ROOSs and from international operational networks and processes these into quality controlled data collections to serve Copernicus Marine Service operational marine forecasting components. The Copernicus Marine Service INS TAC cooperates with EMODnet Physics on the operational data collection and provision.
SeaDataNet is a pan-European network of professional data centres providing on-line integrated databases of standardised quality and developing and promoting standards for marine data management. It is developing and operating an infrastructure for managing, indexing and providing access to ocean and marine environmental data sets and data products (e.g. physical, chemical, geological, and biological properties) and for safeguarding the long term archival and stewardship of these data sets. Data resources are quality controlled and managed at distributed data centres that are interconnected by the SeaDataNet infrastructure and accessible for users through an integrated portal. The data centres are mostly National Oceanographic Data Centres (NODCs). In the context of the EMODnet Physics goals, SeaDataNet arranges the provision of archived and further validated long time series of oceanography data.
In this framework, the MIC -Marine In situ Collaboration- has been established, formed by members of:
- EMODnet Ingestion
- EMODnet Physics
- EMODnet Chemistry
- CMEMS INSTAC
- EuroGOOS
- SeaDataNet
to identify and gather new in-situ datasets and in-situ data providers to support EMODnet, Copernicus Marine Service and international initiatives on Ocean Observations. The team aims to streamline a common ingestion procedure, to provide near real-time data to the operational community and facilitate its availability in National Oceanographic Data Centers and other official repositories for long-term stewardship of these valuable data.
The MIC team is actively working to make all INS TAC data accessible through EMODnet Physics and to include all new data relevant to CMEMS into INS TAC. This involves applying a uniform and unique method to assess data quality within CMEMS, while EMODnet (Physics) is more flexible in accepting various methods and best practices for quality assessment, relying (also) on other official repositories that apply these QC/QF procedures.
Once the operational data is linked in the EMODnet Physics DB the SeaDataNet network of NODCs takes over and undertake efforts for arranging the provision of archived and further validated long time series of oceanography data.