Understanding climate variability requires the development, maintenance and evaluation of a sustained global climate observing system. The purpose of the Observing System Monitoring Center (OSMC), which is being funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Office of Climate Observation (OCO), is to provide a tool that will assist managers and scientists with monitoring the performance of the global in-situ ocean observing system, identifying problems in real-time, and evaluating the adequacy of the observations in support of ocean/climate state estimation, forecasting and research.

The strategy of the OSMC has been to collect ocean observation data and metadata as it flowed through the fire hose of the Global Telecommunication System (GTS). Though much of the ocean in-situ measurements that are made funnel through the GTS system, we've come to realize that in order to have a complete understanding of the ocean observations going into the climate data record, it is necessary to include ocean data that is collected but not distributed via GTS. Including these non –GTS distributed data and metadata can provide some intriguing challenges, such as developing efficient ways to both share the data as well as to integrate the needed data and metadata into the OSMC.

In this presentation, we will be discussing the challenges, strategies, technology and solutions utilized in order to incorporate non-GTS data and metadata into the OSMC data record. Specifically, we will discuss our strategies to incorporate the University of Hawaii sea level data, and the Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System (SAMOS) data into the OSMC, and how these strategies can apply to other data collections. As well, we will discuses the advances in the OSMC climate services which are designed to assist in the analysis of the ocean observing system. Included in these advances are the integration of various climate products, as well as the ability to compare in-situ measurements against climate products, such as the Reynolds daily optimum (OI) interpolation SST from AVHRR.