24th Conference on IIPS
12th Conference on IOAS-AOLS

J1.6

Monitoring and analyzing the Global Ocean Observing System with the Observing System Monitoring Center

Kevin M. O'Brien, JISAO/University of Washington, Seattle, WA; and N. Auerbach, J. Cartwright, T. Habermann, S. Hankin, K. Kern, M. Little, and R. Schweitzer

Understanding climate variability requires the development, maintenance and evaluation of a sustained global climate observing system. The Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC) is a project funded through NOAA's Office of Climate Observation. The goal of the OSMC project is provide a tool that will assist managers and scientists in performance monitoring of the global in-situ ocean observing system. Having the ability to monitor the global ocean observing system will allow real-time identification of any problem or issues that may arise and allow them to be addressed in a timely manner. In addition, the ability to evaluate the adequacy of the observations being taken is very useful in the supporting of ocean/climate state estimation, forecast and research.

As discussed in last years AMS presentation, the focus of the OSMC is on metadata, and on the tools need to interpret the metadata. This year, we have added an additional source of metadata to the OSMC data stream. We hope this will lead to metrics evaluating the differences between data available in the different GTS data streams, and we continue to evaluate other data streams to be added. The tools for the interpretation of the metadata have also evolved, but still give the user both a visual overview of the observing system, as well as the ability to drill down and discover more information concerning the metadata, including platform information and links to actual data.

In this years presentation, we introduce the newly released version 3.0 of the OSMC and discuss it's evolution. It has been enhanced in many ways, including the addition of several platforms as well as new parameters. Among other additions, we have also integrated an evaluation tool into version 3.0 of the OSMC with some specific observing system metrics to help in determining the adequacy of observations. An overview of all the new OSMC features will be the focus of the presentation.

extended abstract  Extended Abstract (520K)

Joint Session 1, Global Earth Observations Session (GCOS) (Continued)
Thursday, 24 January 2008, 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, 206

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