The World Ocean Database Cloud (WODc) - community participation andinteraction with a global database

Abstract:

The World Ocean Database (WOD) is the world's largest freely available, unified format, quality-controlled ocean subsurface profile database. More than 20,000 separate contributions from domestic and international sources have been gathered together to provide as complete a data set as possible of the physical (temperature, salinity), chemical (oxygen, nutrients, carbon, tracers), and to a lesser extent biological (plankton), state of the subsurface ocean and its change over time. One of the biggest obstacles in such a large project is systematically including all relevant measurements from both the global ocean observing system and from specific research efforts worldwide, ensuring proper handling of the data, and providing quality information for the data. Use of the necessarily complex data assembled in the WOD to create products and information vital to understanding the ocean environment and global climate system and effects on human populations is another challenge to full exploitation of the subsurface ocean profile data. The WOD team and partners are planning an initiative to move the WOD to the cloud (WODc) and provide tools for data providers to carry out their own upload of data into the system (while still maintaining the core quality of the WOD) to address the task of inclusiveness by distributing across the worldwide community. The WODc will also provide tools for directly accessing and utilizing the subsurface ocean profile data for partners to create vital products to better leverage the data in the WOD to provide information to scientists, decision makers, and the general public for understanding the ocean environment and planning for changes which the ocean effects on the global climate and human populations. This initiative will be carried out in conjunction with the U. N. Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030).