The primary function of the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO is to bring together, verify, and correct content and format errors in the CTD, hydrographic, and tracer data used in large scale ocean carbon, global change, water mass, and circulation studies. The staff of the CCHDO consists of a team of data experts, documentation specialists, programmer-analysts, and student research assistants who assembles the data with relevant documentation, and carefully prepares them for dissemination and archive. In addition they work to promote appropriate methodology, applicable community standards, communications, and data compatibility. This renewal award will enable the CCHDO to continue its functions for CLIVAR hydrography, global ocean carbon hydrography, and similar programs which use high quality ocean profile data through 2013. The data handled with by the CCHDO are created by >100 data originators worldwide, sometimes with 5 or more PIs separately contributing to one bottle data file. The CCHDO makes it possible for all data users to cope with the temporal-, content-, and format-related file diversity these different originators engender. The CCHDO brings data together to a common content and readability standard, thereby greatly reducing the difficulties research and education data users encounter. A strong additional advantage is that the documentation associated with the data are collected, reorganized to a common standard (where possible), and preserved with the data. The CCHDO disseminates data via the internet (and on request on DVD). It also provides its public holdings to NODC/WDC-A for long-term archive and further distribution.
Broader Impacts: With the merging, verification, content and format correction, and documentation carried out by the CCHDO, present-day and future US and international users of reference-quality CTD, routine hydrography, carbon, and tracer ocean profile data can easily use any of the data files written in the well documentated formats. This makes it much more reliable and affordable for research and education data users to import and use the data. Not only are the data easier to use, their quality and usefulness is much improved by the CCHDO's careful assembly of documentation with the data, helping to assure a service lifetime for the data far into the future, contributing to a broad range of studies of long-term ocean variability. The clean-up of the data and rewriting into netCDF formats also make the data much more straightforward to import into computer models. The data are a primary result of global-scale oceanography programs, and their broad dissemination enhances scientific and technological understanding. The CCHDO supports CLIVAR and carbon science programs, and is a data component of a global observing system for the physical climate/CO2 system. The CCHDO is hence part of a larger international effort to monitor the ocean's response to climate change. For example, these data are used to help quantify the uptake and storage of anthropogenic CO2 by the ocean. The data are used to document long term trends in ocean warming, and heat and freshwater fluxes. The CCHDO puts into play the fundamental concept that data collected belong to the community, and should be available to the community at large.
Intellectual Merit The CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO) at the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography has the fundamental mission of being the repository, assembly center, and distribution center for full-depth global ocean water property (temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrient, carbon, CFC and tracer) data of the highest quality and utility. These data are a product of national and international oceanographic research programs such as the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) and the Climate Variability (CLIVAR) program. Whenever possible the CCHDO provides these data in three widely-used community formats. The CCHDO seeks to assure that these data and their associated documentation are prepared and made readily available for immediate research and education uses, and that these data have a very long service life. File-to-file near-lockstep consistency - "if one can read one CCHDO data file one can read them all" - is a key goal. The CCHDO's primary window to the research community is via its web site . The CCHDO maintains ties with the official national oceanographic archive NODC/WDC-A to see that the entirety of its public holdings are formally archived and up to date at the archive. The CCHDO is an intermediary between investigators carrying out CTD/hydrographic field work and the research/education community, saving data users a great deal of effort by bringing disparate files, information, and formats to a common standard. (Otherwise each data user would need to do this.) At the CCHDO, the CTD, hydrographic, ocean carbon, and tracer data used in ocean circulation and climate studies are brought together, verified, disparate subfiles merged as appropriate, assembled with relevant documentation, and carefully prepared for dissemination and archive. In addition the CCHDO serves as a proactive force in the hydrographic data community, to promote appropriate methodologies, applicable community standards, communications, and data compatibility. At the time this grant ended, the CCHDO supported 1310 cruises, an increase of 449 since the time the grant began in December 2008. During this same period the CCHDO added 2674 new data and documentation files and updated 434 earlier files. The CCHDO added about 2000 pages of documentation each year. Figures 1a-1c illustrate the present geographic spread of CCHDO data, with data updated since 2008 in blue and new data since 2008 in red. There have been ample new data in all the oceans, with the largest change since December 2008 being that the CCHDO has added a great deal of data from the Arctic Ocean and the Nordic Seas. Excluding all SIO users (there is, however, substantial non-CCHDO use from SIO), over the grant years the CCHDO web site was viewed by 5000-14000 visitors per year, from 80-95 countries per year (with primary usage by the nations involved in oceanographic research), with users averaging about 5-6 pages and 5 minutes per visit; 40-50% are considered "new visits". The CCHDO site areas for each WOCE section designator (geographically-overlapping cruises; e.g., "A16N") are visited by about 250-500 distinct users each year, showing the strong, continued research interest in using these data as a reference for global ocean change. Broader Impacts The CCHDO provides seawater property data (e.g., physical and ocean carbon data) which are recognized as the definitive measure of the global ocean from the late 1980s until the present. Disciplines which depend upon these high quality data benefit from the CCHDO's inspection, reformatting, documentation, and distribution of the data. Undergraduate student training and experience is an integral part of the project. Selected students work with an experienced physical oceanographer and a technical team to handle data and documentation and present them in easy to use, understandable form. The broader societal impacts include: broad and near immediate dissemination of data to enhance scientific and technological understanding; societal benefits of availability of a high quality data set, use of the data to assess climate change, and a resource for model calibration of the climate system.
