Updating the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level Archive for the TRUST Era

Abstract:

Since 1933, the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) has been responsible for the collection, publication, analysis and interpretation of sea level data from the global network of tide gauges. Our mission is to provide free, easy access to global long-term mean sea level data and advice to enable science, policy and people, now and for the future. What challenges do we face in making that happen?

The PSMSL is a regular member of the World Data System of the International Science Council, which requires regular re-accreditation. With the publication of the TRUST principles (Transparency, Responsibility, User Community, Sustainability, and Technology) and the move toward making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), the expectations of our data service have grown considerably since we were first established.

Our very purpose is to curate long-term records and our dataset extends back to 1807. We archive data from a large number of suppliers (over 200 national authorities) and in a typical year we receive data from about 80 different organisations. We are investigating how we capture the lineage of datasets, how to properly acknowledge all those who have been involved in collection and curation, how we record changes to sites and sensors over time and how we let users know what quality control has been applied to the data they’ve downloaded.

We’re looking at solving some of these issues by developing persistent identifiers for sites and sensors, including working with the Research Data Alliance Working Group on Persistent Identification of Instruments. We’re setting up an ERDDAP server to deliver data using controlled vocabularies for people and parameters and this year we will issue a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for the PSMSL global dataset.

We’re also going to be extending the dataset using data rescue activities, to help users improve studies on climate change, changes in tides and extreme sea levels.