Quality Assurance of Real-Time Ocean Data: Evolving Infrastructure and Increasing Data Management to Monitor the World's Environment.

Abstract

At the OceanObs'09 Conference, there will be numerous papers and many discussions describing the intense effort by the international community to completely observe the world's oceans. New technologies, new techniques, better ocean vessels, improved sensors and faster data collection - all of these items will be used to observe in real-time, and understand, the ocean more than at any time in our history. Yet, with all the observations being collected, and all the new technology being developed - who, and better yet, how will these data be properly quality controlled, maintained, disseminated and archived? The next ten years will bring many challenges related to the distribution and description of real-time ocean data. One of the primary challenges facing the community will be the fast and accurate assessment of the quality of the data streaming in from new observing systems. Quality control and quality assurance of ocean observations must be a priority for data collectors and observation providers to ensure that the real-time users of the observations, as well as the climate community understand the value of the observation. This White Paper will describe how data managers can properly prepare for, and manage, the incoming wave of ocean observations that will arrive in the next few years.