Abstract

Over the last two decades, the number and complexity of international cooperative programmes has increased. We are just completing WOCE, and JGOFS, but there is the IGBP, CLIVAR, GOOS, GCOS and GTOS among others. Many of these programmes originated in the research community. Using WOCE as an example, the programme organized 13 Data Assembly Centres (DACs) whose jobs were to assemble, quality control, and prepare the data for the final archive. IODE data centres participate in 4 of these DACs while another 4 DACs (non-IODE) handle data that are also managed by many IODE data centres, thus duplicating the effort. The remainder of the DACs dealt with data outside of traditional IODE data centre responsibility. The TOGA/TAO centre at PMEL is an example of a facility that started up in the research community and exists outside of an IODE data centre but which performs many elements that an IODE centre does. TOGA/TAO is a complete program carrying out scientific research, design of an observation programme, building and deploying instrumentation, archiving and disseminating data. It is often cited as a model of what the research community thinks of how a data collection and archive facility should run. If IODE data centres were doing their jobs, the 4 new DACs built to handle oceanographic data in WOCE would not have been created. Likewise, the data management functions now performed by the TOGA/TAO centre would have been sited in an IODE centre. By and large, IODE centres operate independently of each other. The result is that each data centre designs, builds and operates data processing routines …

Metadata

publication

Sixteenth Session of the IOC Committee on International Oceanographic Data …, 2000

year

2000

publication date

2000

authors

S Narayanan, R Keeley

link

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=7335913537346916427&hl=en&oi=scholarr

publisher

Sixteenth Session of the IOC Committee on International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE)