BRITISH OCEANOGRAPHIC DATA CENTRE

1 POL ANNUAL REPORT 1995 - 1996

BODC was established in April 1989 and is managed by POL on behalf of the marine science programme of NERC. It has an international reputation for managing data from large scale oceanographic field experiments and for developing innovative marine data products.

British Oceanographic Data Centre

Distribution of BODC staff effort during 1995 - 1996

Introduction Whereas the conventional view of a data centre is of a repository and distribution point for data, BODC's activities have always been far more wide ranging. It has developed an end to end approach to data management, often being involved with the initial collection of data at sea, invariably assisting with the working up, calibration and quality control of data, and then assembling the data for use by the principal investigators. This involvement in the data collecting process has not only been of immediate benefit to the scientists but has also had considerable bearing on the quality and completeness of the resultant data sets. Since its formation, BODC has also played an active role in designing and developing innovative marine data products for use on personal computers. These have concerned both the electronic publication of project data sets and the compilation of digital atlases and data catalogues. BODC's activities are organised on a project basis with each project having well defined goals and a clearly identified customer.

The projects fall naturally into three categories:

� data management support to community research projects such as NERC's Land Ocean Interaction Study (LOIS) and its Plankton Reactivity in the Marine Environment (PRIME) project, the UK component of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the EC's Ocean Margin Exchange (OMEX) project;

� the development and production of

digital atlases such as the UK Digital Marine Atlas (UKDMAP) and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO), and digital data catalogues such as the EC's European Directory of Marine Environmental Data (EDMED);

� well found data centre activities such

as maintaining the national oceanographic database, servicing customer requests, participating in international data exchange and developing computer systems to facilitate the Data Centre's work.

In addition, BODC has a special responsibility for capturing and managing the data from the UK National Tide Gauge Network.

BRITISH OCEANOGRAPHIC DATA CENTRE

POL ANNUAL REPORT 1995 - 1996 2

Project Data Management Almost 50% of BODC's work is now geared to managing data from large scale, multi-disciplinary, oceanographic field programmes. At present, this is focused on the RACS study off NE England, the SES study on the Hebridean Shelf Edge and the OMEX project in the area of the Goban Spur. BODC staff participated in all six legs of RRS Challenger cruises 118 (April/May 1995) and 119 (June/July 1995) which ran repeated grids between Great Yarmouth and the Tweed. The CTD and underway surface data for both cruises were worked up as a matter of routine at BODC. Combined with the earlier data collected on RRS Challenger cruises 99, 108, 115 and 117, the database now contains a full set of the CTDs (900 casts) and underway measurements collected on RACS cruises. Work continues on assembling the sample data for these cruises which are loaded onto the project database as and when the results of laboratory analyses are submitted. The SES field programme started in March 1995 and BODC staff provided onboard data management support on ten legs of RRS Charles Darwin cruises 91, 92, 93 and RRS Challenger cruises 121, 123 and 125 during the period up to March 1996. All 599 CTDs and the underway surface data collected on these cruises were worked up by BODC. As the RACS and SES data are assembled they are made available on-line for remote access by the project scientists. A two day training course was held in January 1996 to advise scientists on how to make best use of this facility. Working under contract to the EC, BODC acts as the Project Data Centre for OMEX, a multinational study of the biogeochemical fluxes and processes across the European shelf break facing the North Atlantic. The OMEX field programme took place between May 1993 and October 1995 and comprised 40 cruises by 12 research vessels from Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and the UK. BODC is responsible for assembling all of these data into a comprehensive project data set and for facilitating interchange of the data amongst the project's scientists.

Considerable progress has been made in assembling the OMEX data, and BODC staff have established good working relationships with the scientists involved from over 30 laboratories. A detailed data tracking inventory is kept of all the data collected, and this was mounted on the World Wide Web to keep project scientists informed on the data available. Well over 500 separate sets of data have been identified for banking to date, and by year end about a half of these had been successfully lodged at BODC. They include data on physical oceanography, biology, biogeochemistry, benthic processes and air/sea fluxes. Within each discipline there is an immense diversity of data, and the data management challenge presented by the OMEX project is beyond anything attempted in the marine field hitherto either within the UK or abroad. Most of the automatically logged data submitted to BODC for OMEX have required some element of further processing, not only to transfer them into a common format but also to complete their calibration and to ensure their quality. During the year, 506 CTD casts from 9 cruises were worked through onto the project database, together with 305 XBTs and the SeaSoar data from RRS Charles Darwin cruise 85. Underway surface data files were established for a further 9 cruises and some 1054 days of moored current meter

BODC acts as the Project Data Centre for the EC's Ocean Margin Exchange (OMEX) Project and for the marine component of NERC's Land-Ocean Interaction Study,

comprising the Shelf Edge Study (SES) and the River-Atmosphere-Coast Study (RACS)

CTD - water bottle rosette ready for deployment at dawn off RRS Challenger

BRITISH OCEANOGRAPHIC DATA CENTRE

3 POL ANNUAL REPORT 1995 - 1996

Illuminated view of the shelf edge bathymetry in the area being studied by

the OMEX project (vertical exaggeration 35:1)

BODC manages the sea level data from the UK National Tide Gauge Network

on behalf of POL

data were worked up into their final form. A wide variety of sample data was also loaded onto the project database including data on pigments, nutrients, dissolved gases, trace metals, carbon and nitrogen cycles, suspended particulate matter, marine snow, primary production, microzooplankton, boxcore macrofauna and sediment biogeochemistry. Good progress was made in working up and assembling the data collected as part of NERC's PRIME project on RRS Discovery cruises 210 and 212 to the Indian Ocean in 1994. Data from some 289 CTDs were processed, calibrated and loaded onto BODC's on-line database and the underway surface data from both cruises were worked up. The nutrient, oxygen, carbon dioxide, productivity, phytoplankton, bacterial counts and pigment data collected from the water bottle samples on both cruises were also acquired and loaded onto the database. CTD Data Banking With funding from the MOD, work continued on rescuing and assembling all CTD data collected by UK laboratories since the mid 1970s, and a further 4000 CTD profiles from 8 laboratories were screened and reformatted for delivery to the Hydrographic Office during the year. With the closing down of the marine physics group at Dunstaffnage Marine Laboratory, a special effort was made to acquire and bank the recently collected CTD data on the DML standard sections across the Hebridean Shelf; earlier data for the period 1975 to 1991 had already

been assembled at BODC as a contribution to UK WOCE. Some 596 CTD casts were acquired from 9 cruises of RRS Challenger covering the period 1992-95. Preprocessing work was carried out on the raw data, which were then screened and loaded onto BODC's main database. Tide Gauge Networks BODC has a special responsibility on behalf of POL for the remote monitoring and retrieval of fifteen minute sea level data from the 44 coastal sites that make up the National Tide Gauge Network. Daily checks are kept on the performance of the gauges and the data are downloaded weekly. These are then routinely processed and quality controlled on a monthly basis prior to being loaded onto the BODC database and made available for scientific use. BODC staff also manage the sea level data from Faraday and Signy received via the British Antarctic Survey as well as the satellite transmitted sea level data from Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha and Port Stanley. BODC continues to act as the Sea Level Data Assembly Centre for WOCE with international responsibility for assembling, quality controlling and disseminating data from a worldwide network of 122 tide gauge sites. Some 354 site years of data from 79 tide gauges were quality controlled and banked during the year, bringing the total holding of banked data to 1650 site years. As the data are banked they are loaded onto a public access directory linked to the World Wide Web thereby making them instantly available to investigating scientists across the world.

BRITISH OCEANOGRAPHIC DATA CENTRE

POL ANNUAL REPORT 1995 - 1996 4

Digital Atlases Acting under the joint auspices of the IOC and the IHO, BODC has responsibility for developing the GEBCO Digital Atlas as an authoritative digital bathymetric chart of the world's oceans. Having published the first version of the Digital Atlas on CD-ROM in March 1994, BODC is now actively preparing material for its updating. Considerable progress has been made in digitising a revised bathymetry of the Indian Ocean being compiled by Dr. Robert L Fisher of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. His compilation between Antarctica and 30°S will be published in the next version of the CD-ROM, due out in late 1996, together with improved bathymetry in the Weddell Sea and the North East Atlantic. The Second Edition of the UK Digital Marine Atlas, published by BODC in 1992, continues to generate considerable interest and the number of copies sold/ distributed has almost reached the 1000 mark. The Atlas contains a wealth of thematic information on the coasts and seas around the British Isles. In preparation for the publication of the Third Edition in 1997, a Microsoft Windows version of the Atlas software has been written and a further 20 new data sets were added covering such diverse themes as RNLI callouts in 1994; monthly charts of concentrations of birds vulnerable to surface pollution in the seas around the UK; and a MAFF survey of the fishing ports of England and Wales. Data Inventories BODC maintains the European Directory of Marine Environmental Data on behalf of the EC. It now contains descriptions of over 2000 data sets held by 477 different centres in 11 European countries. Over the past year the information has been assembled into a purpose built database system developed at BODC and the Directory is due to be installed on the World Wide Web in late 1996.

In preparation for publishing the Third Edition of the International Current Meter Inventory on behalf of the IOC, BODC compiled contributions from Canada, Denmark, Faroes, France, Germany, Japan, Malta, Netherlands,

Norway, Portugal and Tunisia. This has added a further 7631 entries to the 29,000 current meter series already referenced in the inventory. Customer Services During the year BODC staff serviced 1035 customer requests, comprising 455 ad-hoc requests for data and/or information and 580 requests for copies of BODC's standard data products. Some 285 of the ad-hoc requests resulted in the supply of data, of which about 75% came from within the UK marine science community. Requests for BODC's standard products resulted in the dispatch of 262 copies of the GEBCO Digital Atlas, 74 copies of UKDMAP, 27 copies of the BOFS North Atlantic CD-ROM, 16 copies of the North Sea Project CD-ROM and 201 copies of the UK Directory of marine data. In addition, a further 914 requests were self serviced by users directly accessing BODC's on-line project databases, bringing the total number of requests serviced in 1995/96 to just under 2000!

Recent additions to the UK Digital Marine

Atlas include monthly charts of the vulnerability of seabird concentrations to surface pollution, as provided by the Joint

Nature Conservation Committee

Interest in the GEBCO Digital Atlas remains high with over 600 copies sold/distributed to customers in 63

different countries