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Leveraging Long-Term Environmental Archives
Session Time January 10th; 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Location White Flint
Description The purpose of this session is to discuss how users synthesize large quantities of long-term archived environmental data - from multiple disciplines capturing important sun to ocean floor earth parameters - to develop new products and spur research that addresses compelling scientific questions and societal challenges and provides decision makers with actionable information. This session will also discuss ways to leverage NOAA and other environmental archives and archive related activities including long term observations. Mining long term observations provides new revelations, reference baselines for studying dynamics, and touchstones representing current scientific understanding. Integrative data approaches that incorporate all of the information content, utilizing sophisticated methods (e.g. new statistical methods; data and physics assimilation; feature classification; search, discovery and federation of diverse sources) and other emerging “Big Data” analysis and fusion techniques are a powerful way to overcome the challenges, and they rely on the many scientifically-curated datasets carefully managed by NOAA NCEI and other likeminded international institutions.
Chair Kelly Stroker
Presentations and Notes Click Here!


Talk Length (min) Title Presenter
6C.1 15 Improving NESDIS Data Management Planning Helen Wood
6C.2 15 Improved Data Curation and Exploration: A Timeline for Visualizing Data Inventory Aaron Sweeney
6C.3 15 Establishing a NOAA Passive Acoustic Data Archive for Long-Term Storage and Access Carrie Wall
6C.4 15 Access to 50 years of Scientific Ocean Drilling Data. But that’s not all! Kelly Stroker
6C.5 15 Scientific Stewardship of Ocean Satellite Data Sheekela Baker-Yeboah
6C.6 15 Open Discussion


Abstracts
6C.1 Improving NESDIS Data Management Planning

Helen Wood (NESDIS/NESDIS/OSAAP)

Scott Hausman (NESDIS)

NESDIS has developed a policy for the management of data and information generated by its Observing Systems and associated Data Management Systems. The policy is intended to ensure that NESDIS Environmental Data are properly planned and supported through their lifecycle. In addition to presenting the key elements of the policy, this talk will describe some of the challenges encountered during its development.


6C.2 Improved Data Curation and Exploration: A Timeline for Visualizing Data Inventory

Aaron Sweeney (NESDIS/NCEI)

We report on the effectiveness of visualizing data inventory via timelines for improving the curation and exploration of archived ocean-bottom pressure data and coastal tide gauge data at the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). Metadata about the inventories are expressed in Javascript Object Notation (JSON) format and visualized on a timeline through an open-source Javascript library (VisJS). Through this timeline, gaps in coverage immediately become apparent. Within the first two months of this timeline going live, our primary data provider used this inventory visualization to identify and submit for archive 17 at-risk data packages from the backlog of data collection that were not previously submitted for archive. Given the high cost of collecting these data, this represents a significant return on investment. Along with the inventory timeline, instrument deployment pages were also published providing time-series plots and direct access to unassessed data, quality-controlled data products, modeled tidal constituents, supporting metadata, and a list of associated tsunami events. These products support the research forecasting efforts of the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (OAR/PMEL) which then transfers products to the NOAA Tsunami Warning Centers for operational usage. This occurs under the auspices of the US NOAA Tsunami Program. These products also support the broader tsunami modeling community. This timeline adds a new dimension to data stewardship and discovery. See this link.


6C.3 Establishing a NOAA Passive Acoustic Data Archive for Long-Term Storage and Access

Carrie Wall (NESDIS/NCEI/University of Colorado)

Charles Anderson (NESDIS), Sofie Van Parijs (NMFS), Leila Hatch (NOS), Jason Gedamke (NMFS)

Passive acoustic monitoring of the ocean sound field is a critical aspect of NOAA’s mandate for ocean and coastal data stewardship. Sound can travel vast distances underwater (e.g. across ocean basins) making passive acoustic monitoring a powerful observational tool that is used across NOAA to detect and characterize: (1) sounds produced and used by living marine resources (e.g., endangered marine mammals, commercially important fish species); (2) natural sources of noise from physical oceanographic processes; and (3) anthropogenic noise sources that contribute to the overall ocean noise environment. The NOAA Ocean Noise Reference Station Network, through a unique collaborative effort across NOAA’s OAR, NMFS, and NOS offices, is the first ever acoustic monitoring system deployed broadly throughout the US EEZ, and allows NOAA to collect consistent and comparable multi-year acoustic data sets covering all major regions of the U.S.. NOAA's recently released Ocean Noise Strategy Roadmap highlighted the importance of establishing a centralized, long-term archive for these passive acoustic data, and the development of the archive is designated as a flagship project of the Ocean Noise Strategy. Toward that end and in compliance with PARR, NMFS and collaborative partners are proactively seeking mechanisms to efficiently maintain and store passive acoustic data. A 2016 BEDI proposal is underway to progress a 2014-2015 pilot project and establish passive acoustic data stewardship at NCEI. A new web-based map viewer has been built to allow the public to discover, query and access archived passive acoustic data. Additional datasets collected as part of the Ocean Noise Reference Station Network will be included in the data that are made available to the public. The current and future implementation plans for an operational archive of passive acoustic data for NOAA’s OAR, NMFS and NOS offices as well as the challenges of managing large volume and multi-platform data will be discussed.


6C.4 Access to 50 years of Scientific Ocean Drilling Data. But that’s not all!

Kelly Stroker (NESDIS/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES))

Barry Eakins (CIRES), Jennifer Jencks (NOAA/NCEI), Ken Tanaka (CIRES), Erin Reeves (CIRES), Chris Esterlein

Geophysical data has long been stewarded safely and securely by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), formerly the National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC). This includes, but is certainly not limited to, digital data and geologic sample photographs from 50 years of drilling into the sea floor to recover sediment cores and rocks in order to answer fundamental questions about Earth’s geologic history and long-term evolution of ocean biota and global climate. This stewardship mission has been reinforced and strengthened through participation in a variety of international programs, including hosting and operating the World Data Service for Geophysics, the International Hydrographic Organization’s Data Center for Digital Bathymetry, and the long-term archive for geologic samples data collected by the international scientific ocean drilling program. While the mission to provide long-term scientific data stewardship ensuring quality, integrity, and accessibility has remained largely unchanged for more than 200 years, the methods and technologies used to collect data have changed substantially as have user requests and expectations on the quality of the data and the volumes of data they receive. NCEI has been working towards a common NCEI Extract System (NEXT) to deliver a variety of geophysical data that NCEI stewards as well as handle the volume of data requested. The NEXT system handles every aspect from receiving data requests, collecting and packaging results, and delivering these results to the user. The system is easily extensible for new data and provides a programmatic interface so that external users and services can access it. In this paper we will describe an example of an NSF-funded, 1-year project to provide easy, Internet access to over 50 years of scientific ocean drilling (SOD) data in NCEI’s deep, tape archive through the NEXT graphical user interface as well as an API to enable our partners to build their own web applications to access these data.


6C.5 Scientific Stewardship of Ocean Satellite Data

Sheekela Baker-Yeboah (NESDIS/NCEI/CICS-MD)

Korak Saha(NCEI/CICS), Yongsheng Zhang(NCEI/CICS), Dexin Zhang(NCEI/STC)

Part of NOAA’s mission is the archive and stewardship of oceanographic data and the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) play an important institutional role by serving as the authoritative source within the US and abroad, providing rigorous long-term archival services. NCEI provides scientific stewardship of remotely sensed oceanographic data, which consists of the application of an integrated suite of functions designed to preserve and exploit the full scientific value of environmental data and information over the long-term (decades). NCEI also develops satellite data products and provides authoritative records. Some examples of scientific stewardship and product development will be presented.

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