SEA-SEARCH 1st Group Meeting Istanbul, May 15th-18th, 2003

OGS-NODC (Italy) presentationby Alessandra Giorgetti and Renzo Mosetti

National Institute of Oceanography and Experimental Geophysics – OGS is a public research institute, sponsored by Italian Ministry of University and Scientific Research (MURST), active in the major geophysical research fields of seismic prospecting, seismology, oceanography and environmental geophysics.

It’s origin goes back to the second half of ‘700, when the School of Astronomy and Navigation was stated in Trieste; after a series of re-organisations, it became National Institute in 1999.

OGS employs a staff of approximately 250 people (permanent, contracts and grants), and includes 3 departments:

Solid Earth Geophysics

Oceanography

Seismological Centre located in Udine

OGS oceanographic infrastructures:

R/V OGS-Explora

Oceanographic Calibration Center

National Oceanographic Data Center

http://nodc.ogs.trieste.it/

The vessel was designed for geophysical prospecting. The instrument equipment has been expanded with a Multibeam system and an acoustic current meter ADCP.

It has overall length of 72,78 m and gross tonnage of 1.408 t. The prow-bulge and completely reinforced hull allow navigation through ice.

The laboratory monitors and calibrates oceanographic instruments, tests and aids in the development of new instrumentation. It is equipped with high-quality probes and recommended primary reference materials, three thermostatic baths, a pressure balance (Dead-weight tester) and various kinds of electrical/electronic testing equipment.

The Department of Oceanography has a long experience in pure and applied research, of experimental and numerical oceanography mainly focused in the Mediterranean Sea. Multidisciplinary studies has been and is still carried out in Antarctica in the frame of the Italian participation to the Antarctica treaty.

The oceanographic research includes:

• Operational Oceanography on coastal zones, including maintenance, calibration and validation of long-term, near real-time meteo-oceanographic monitoring systems

• Ecological modelling and hydrodynamics, focused on the study of the Mediterranean pelagic ecosystem, of the trophic characteristics of the Adriatic coastal zones, on data assimilation

• Remote Sensing, focused on the acquisition, real-time processing and visualisation of satellite data, coastal radar andlagrangian systems

• Physical Oceanography, focused on climate variability studies and it’s consequences on the thermohaline and biochemical characteristics of the Adriatic Sea and Mediterranean, coastal small-scale analyses, oceanographic data collection, data management and archiving

OGS detains a large quantity of oceanographic data spanning over mass field measurements, marine currents, wind waves and air-sea interface parameters. The data have been collected by means of surveys, moorings and operational ocean buoy systems.

OGS has strengthen the data management activity at national and international level, by the participation at several EU funded research projects:

• the EU-MAST-MTP /MODB (Mediterranean Oceanic Data Base),

• the EU-MAST-MTPII/MATER (MAss Transfer and Ecosystem Response),

• the EU-MEDAR/MEDATLAS II (Mediterranean Data Archaeology and Rescue),

• the EU-EuroGOOS-EDIOS (European Directory of the Initial Observing System),

• the EU-SeaSearch, a Pan-European Network For Ocean & Marine Data and Information Management.

An important European network has been developed, increasing the communication between data centres and users, hence allowing the establishment of standard protocols for data exchange, validation and dissemination.

The OGS, acting as Regional Data Centre for the Central Mediterranean region (Adriatic, Ionian Sea and Sicily Channel), has been responsible for the data and meta-data collected during field experiments and historical ones.

RDC

W Basin RDC

Adriatic

IonianRDCE Basin

DATA MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE

Comprehensive and fully validated data sets were produced within the European distributed network of Mediterranean oceanographic data centres:

the MEDATLAS 2002, comprehensive observed and gridded data sets of temperature, salinity and bio-chemical data in the Mediterranean and Black Sea,

the MEDATLAS 2002 climatological vertical profiles,

the MTP II-MATER 1996-1999, information and multidisciplinary data obtained from the largest research oceanographic programme in the Mediterranean Sea.

Data ProductsData Products

OGS has been notified as National Oceanographic Data Centre for Italy within the International Oceanographic Data Exchange (IODE) system of the UNESCO Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) since June 2002.

http://nodc.ogs.trieste.it/

The OGS-NODC on-line server, gives access to systematically compiled and updated meta-data directories, with:

sea cruise information,

data reports,

projects and operational sites reports,

archived data.

The OGS - NODC oceanographic data base, mainly devoted to the Mediterranean Seas, contains:

more than 15,000 hydrological stations (bottle and CTD casts),

more than 1,500 current meter time series in 200 different points,

up to 63,000 wave measurements, sea level and meteorological parameters along the Mediterranean coasts,

surface data of temperature, salinity and current collected underway,

Lagrangian current time series.

The ASCII auto-descriptive MEDAR/MEDATLAS format, based on the international IOC/GF3 and ICES standards, is used for data exchange.

Data FormatData Format

*IO48197979013 ASCOP 1 (ITT) 48B1 BANNOCK29/10/1979-09/11/1979 ADRIATIC SEA48 ISTITUTO TALASSOGRAFICO, TRIESTEBREGANT Davide Project=ASCOPRegional Archiving= IO Availability=PData Type=H09 n=23 QC=YData Type=H21 n=23 QC=YCOMMENTDM=TEMP and PSAL controlled with MODB climatological values *IO4819797901300070 Data Type=H09*DATE=02111979 TIME=1125 LAT=N45 16.90 LON=E 13 16.00 DEPTH= 31 QC=1111*NB PARAMETERS=05 RECORD LINES=00005*PRES SEA PRESSURE sea surface=0 (decibar=10000 pascals) def.=-999.9*TEMP SEA TEMPERATURE (Celsius degree) def.=99.999*PSAL PRACTICAL SALINITY (P.S.U.) def.=99.999*DOX1 DISSOLVED OXYGEN (ml/l) def.=99.99*NTRA NITRATE (NO3-N) CONTENT (millimole/m3) def.=99.99*GLOBAL PROFILE QUALITY FLAG=1 GLOBAL PARAMETER QC FLAGS=11111091100900*DC HISTORY=**DM HISTORY=**COMMENT =*Data were received with depth as reference, assimilated as pressure.**SURFACE SAMPLES=**PRES TEMP PSAL DOX1 NTRA-999.9 99.999 99.999 99.99 99.99

Quality AssuranceQuality Assurance

Data Quality Assurance is considered at all stages of the data handling:

The data are collected and validated by the scientific laboratories

Quality checks are performed at the regional data centres before the final archiving, in conformity with International IOC and MAST protocols and guidelines.Each data set of vertical profiles or time series is submitted to a set of automatic checks. As a result, the data points are displayed on a screen highlighting the quality flag added to each numerical value (GTSPP flag scale).

The results of these checks are transmitted to the scientists for cross-checking

The importance of technologyThe importance of technology

Data and meta-data are organised in relational database (RDBMS) using ORACLE software. Efficient and adapted routines have been implemented to:

insert data in the data base

obtain queries on archived information

extract data in MEDAR/MEDATLAS format

to perform the quality check

data analyses and visualisation

to disseminate data on line.

OGS – NODC currently operates in support of Italian infrastructures as well as in marine science projects, maintaining and developing high quality national and international oceanographic data and meta-data bases, readily available to Italian research scientists in academia, government and industry.

OGS-NODC activity within SEA-SEARCH:

To give visibility to regional meta-data collected, OGS-NODC has developed a SEA-SERCH Web site:

http://doga.ogs.trieste.it/sea-search/

OGS-NODC, as new Sea-Search partner, provided the following entries in the SEA-SEARCH meta-data directories:

EDMED: updated institutes names/directions/contactsupdated EDMED form 03-002-032added 4 new EDMED forms (03-002-49 … 03-002-52)

EDMERP: sent 2 EDMEPR forms by e-mailwaiting for Italian EDMEDRP database

ROSCOP: added 1 ROSCOP form via Web + 2 ROSCOP forms by e-mail

OGS – NODC is a new partner, but it is not the first Italian project partner …