Coatanoan, Christine

The IMDIS cycle of conferences has the aim of providing an overview of the existing information systems to serve different users in ocean science. It also shows the progresses on development of efficient: infrastructures for managing large and diverse data sets, standards, interoperable information systems, services and tools for education. The Conference will present different systems for on­line access to data, meta­data and products, communication standards and adapted technology to ensure platforms interoperability. Sessions will focus on infrastructures, technologies and services for different users: environmental authorities, research, schools, universities, etc.

The needs of society and the emerging blue economy require access and integration of data and information for the construction of dedicated products. A “transparent and accessible ocean” is one of the key objectives of the Ocean Decade 2021–30. In this context, marine infrastructures become significant components of a global knowledge environment, enabling environmental assessment and providing the necessary data for scientifically valid actions to protect and restore ocean health, to use marine resources in a sustainable way. The data is collected, analyzed, organized, and used by people and their good use/reuse can be obtained with social practices, technological and physical agreements aimed at facilitating collaborative knowledge, decision-making, inference. The vision is a digital ocean data ecosystem made up of multiple, interoperable, and scalable components. The huge amount of data and the resulting products can drive the development of new knowledge as well as new applications and services. Predictive capabilities that derive from the digital ecosystem enable the implementation of services for real-time decision-making, multihazard warning systems, and advance marine space planning. The chapter develops following the progressive complexity and information content of products deriving from oceanic data: data cycle and data collections, data products, oceanic reanalysis. The chapter discusses the new challenges of data products and the complexity of deriving them.

Temperature and Salinity historical data collections covering the time period 1900-2013/2014 were created for each European marginal sea (Arctic Sea, Baltic Sea, Black Sea, North Sea, North Atlantic Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea) within the framework of SeaDataNet2 Project and they are available as ODV collections through a web catalog (https://www.seadatanet.org/Products/Aggregated-datasets). Two versions have been published and they represent a snapshot of the SeaDataNet database content at two different times: V1.1 (January 2014) and V2 (March 2015). A Quality Control Strategy (QCS) was developped and continuously refined in order to improve the quality of the database content and create the best data products. The QCS consists of four main phases: 1) data harvesting from the data infrastructure; 2) file and parameter aggregation; 3) secondary quality check analysis; 4) correction of data anomalies. The approach is iterative to facilitate the upgrade of the database content and it allows a versioning of data products. Regional temperature and salinity monthly climatologies have been produced from V1.1 historical data collections and they are also available (https://www.seadatanet.org/Products/Climatologies). Within the new SeaDataCloud Project the release of updated historical data collections and new climatologies is planned. SeaDataCloud novelties are the introduction of decadal climatologies at various resolutions, the development of climatologies for the Global Ocean and a task dedicated to new data products, like Mixed Layer Depth climatologies, Ocean Heat Content estimates, coastal climatologies from HF radar data. All SeaDataCloud products are available through a dedicated web catalogue together with their relative Digital Object Identifier (DOI) and Product Information Document (PIDoc) containing all specifications about product’s generation, quality assessment and technical details to facilitate users’ uptake. The presentation will briefly overview the existing SeaDataNet products and introduce the SeaDataCloud products’ plan, but the main focus will be on the first release (February 2018) of SeaDataCloud Temperature and Salinity historical data collections, spanning the time period 1900-2017, their characteristics in terms of space-time data distribution and their usability.

In the frame of the SeaDataNet project, several regional climatologies for the temperature and salinity are being developed by different groups. The data used for these climatologies are distributed by the 40 SeaDataNet data centers. Such climatologies have several uses: 1. the detection of outliers by comparison of the in situ data with the climatological fields, 2. the the optimization of locations of new observations, 3. the initialization of numerical hydrodynamic models. 4. definition of a reference state to identify anomalies and to detect long-term climatic trends Diva (Data Interpolating Variational Analysis) software is adapted to each region by taking into account the geometrical characteristics (coastlines, bathymetry) and the distribution of data (correlation length, signal-to-noise ratio, reference field). The regional climatologies treated in this work are: - JRA5: North Atlantic - JRA6: Mediterranean Sea - JRA7: Baltic Sea - JRA8: North Sea, Arctic Sea Several examples of gridded fields are presented in this work. The validation of the different products is carried out through a comparison with the last release of the widespread World Ocean Atlas 2005.