Data inter-operability driven by oceanic data assimilation needs

An interactive data access and retrieval system, developed at the U.S. Nati onal Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) and available at http://www.node.noaa .gov, is presented in this paper. The purposes of this paper are: (1) to il lustrate the procedures of quality control and loading oceanographic data i nto the NODC ocean data-bases and (2) to describe the development of a syst em to manage, visualize, and disseminate the NODC data holdings over the In ternet. The objective of the system is to provide ease of access to data th at will be required for data assimilation models. With advances in scientif ic understanding of the ocean dynamics, data assimilation models require th e synthesis of data from a variety of resources. Modem. intelligent data sy stems usually involve integrating distributed heterogeneous data and inform ation sources. As the repository for oceanographic data, NOAA's National Oc eanographic Data Center (NODC) is in a unique position to develop such a da ta system. In support of the data assimilation needs, NODC has developed a system to facilitate browsing of the oceanographic environmental data and i nformation that is available on-line at NODC. Users may select oceanographi c data based on geographic areas, time periods and measured parameters. Onc e the selection is complete, users may produce a station location plot, pro duce plots of the parameters or retrieve the data.