SeaDataNet is an international project of oceanography. Its main goal is to enable the scientific community to access historical datasets owned by national data centers.

Description

This project aims to provide a web service permitting to retrieve validated datasets (

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various temperature scales that historically have relied on ...

oxygen Oxygen is the chemical element with the symbol O and atomic number 8. It is a member of the chalcogen group in the periodic table, a highly reactive nonmetal, and an oxidizing agent that readily forms oxides with most elements as we ...

salinity Salinity () is the saltiness or amount of salt dissolved in a body of water, called saline water (see also soil salinity). It is usually measured in g/L or g/kg (grams of salt per liter/kilogram of water; the latter is dimensionless and equal ...

nutrients A nutrient is a substance used by an organism to survive, grow, and reproduce. The requirement for dietary nutrient intake applies to animals, plants, fungi, and protists. Nutrients can be incorporated into cells for metabolic purposes or excr ...

, etc.) from 45 different National Data Centers of 35 countries having coasts along European seas. Therefore SeaDataNet is a standardized system for managing the large and diverse data sets collected by the oceanographic fleets and the automatic observation systems. Additional objectives consist in creating product with aggregated data such as climatological descriptions. This European funded project has started in 2004, the project is currently in its second phase with fundings for 2012 to 2016. Most of the datasets are free of access, but some are restricted to institutes. In term of harmonization SeaDataNet has chosen standards, vocabularies, tools that are used in the different NODC(National Oceanographic Data Center). For example they use

Ocean Data View Ocean Data View (ODV) is a proprietary, freely available, software package for the analysis and visualization of oceanographic and meteorological data sets. ODV is used by a large number of oceanographers. The UNESCO Ocean Teacher project employs ...

to validate or visualize datasets, they also use

DIVA software DIVA (Data-Interpolating Variational Analysis) allows the spatial interpolation/gridding of data (''analysis'') in an optimal way, comparable to optimal interpolation (OI), taking into account uncertainties on observations. In comparison to standard ...

to perform

objective analysis In philosophy, objectivity is the concept of truth independent from individual subjectivity (bias caused by one's perception, emotions, or imagination). A proposition is considered to have objective truth when its truth conditions are met with ...

. Datasets are covering the years 1800 up to 2012. In 2012 400 data originators are registered into Seadatanet project. SeaDataNet request

Usage

Users of SeaDataNet who want to retrieve datasets coming from multiple Data Centers log to the Common Data Index web-service to define their request. They can provide many details such as the type of platform wanted, the parameter wanted, the rate of sampling, the position, the originator country, etc. Then users send their request, the request is analysed and split into as much request as there are data centers concerned. At the end the user receive an email giving a FTP address where to retrieve all the data ordered in the file format wanted (

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

NetCDF NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a set of software libraries and self-describing, machine-independent data formats that support the creation, access, and sharing of array-oriented scientific data. The project homepage is hosted by the Unidata ...

format).

References

External links

* Information technology organizations based in Europe Physical oceanography Science and technology in Merseyside {{ocean-stub