Revisiting In-situ Observation Data Workflows from Saildrone Platforms

Abstract:

Autonomous observing platforms present significant future opportunities. The value of autonomous sea-going platforms have been shown during recent times manned vessels have been unable to operate. NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) has been evaluating Saildrones as observing platforms with some of this effort focusing on the data handling.

As NOAA UxS strategy unfolds the data enterprise of this strategy is being refined. One solution proposes the establishment of distributed Data Assembly Centers Federated Sciences Data assembly Centers - FS-DACs) that encapsulate clusters of complexity, before data are aggregated at a single UxS-DAC. This presentation will focus on one of these FS-DACs, one that will pilot an implementation for data derived from Saildrone vehicles at PMEL. The presentation will discuss the data acceptance infrastructure, and how IT security considerations affect this implementation. Results of new in-line data quality-control implementation will be shown. Data dissemination pathways address the need for both research and operational users. These pathways will be shown, and how we make use of NOAA developed “off the shelf” applications in lieu of custom development. The presentation will explain how the FD-DAC will be one node in the vision for UxS data management and data handling capabilities being prototyped in collaboration with NOAA’s Center for Environmental Information (NCEI).