2011 - Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences ...

NGDC-02MarineGeophysicsDataStewardship
FEDERAL LEAD: SUSAN McLEAN
CIRES LEAD: BARRY EAKINS
NOAA Goal 4: Transportation
Project Goal: Contribute to a streamlined, more fully automated,
accessible, and Web-based management and stewardship process
for marine geophysical data in support of seafloor research
at CIRES and throughout the environmental science community.
Milestone 1. Search, target, acquire and provide access to
new and historical marine geophysical data (e.g., bathymetry,
gravity, seismic and magnetics) from the global oceanographic
community.
Since July 2010, 230 multibeam swath sonar surveys
(904,199 nautical miles) and 26 trackline (single-beam
bathymetry, magnetics, gravity and seismic reflection) surveys
(67,462 nautical miles), throughout all of the world’s
oceans, have been added to the National Geophysical
Data Center’s (NGDC) global marine geophysical archives
by NGDC and CIRES staff. Both national and international
Figure 1: Screen grab of NGDC’s interactive ‘Bathymetry Data Viewer.’
Lines represent ship tracks in the Gulf of Mexico with publicly available
multibeam swath sonar and single-beam bathymetric data.
Figure 2: New polar projection web map of the Arctic Ocean. The circles
represent the location of geological samples collected in and around the Arctic
Ocean.
88 CIRES Annual Report 2011
organizations contribute to and retrieve marine geophysical
data from the interactive databases. Marine geophysical
data archived at and delivered by NGDC are currently
supporting two specific, ongoing U.S. mapping efforts:
the Extended Continental Shelf (ECS) project and the
Integrated Ocean and Coastal Mapping (IOCM) program.
NGDC provides long-term archiving, stewardship and
delivery of data to scientists and the public by utilizing
standard metadata, spatially enabled databases, robotic
tape archive and standards-based web services.
Milestone 2. Improve metadata content and data discovery
capability for marine geophysical data in support of the
U.S. Extended Continental Shelf and Integrated Ocean and
Coastal Modeling projects, including a “Data Inventory” that
enables comment and access to a variety of marine geophysical
data in a geographically distributed environment.
In the past year CIRES and NGDC staff have collaborated
with scientists and data experts from several U.S federal
agencies and academic science data centers on developing
common metadata standards for marine seismic reflection
data, multibeam bathymetric data, bottom geologic samples
and cruise level data for both the U.S. ECS project and the
IOCM program. This includes templates, vocabularies,
documentation rules, best practices and crosswalks to federal
and international standards. An NGDC/CIRES-developed
metadata editor tool along with templates was deployed
on a Gulf of Alaska cruise to enable scientists to complete
metadata information while at sea. Data and metadata collected
and identified as relevant for the U.S. ECS project will
be used to define the maximum extent of the U.S. continental
shelf.
Staff have also enhanced the capability of NGDC’s interactive
web maps, including adding a polar projection, and
improved the user interfaces. New web map tools have been
created for identifying, querying and commenting on the
suitability of geophysical surveys within the ECS ‘Dynamic
Inventory’ web map, which shows the spatial coverage of
all available marine geophysical surveys from a variety of
federal government and academic sources. Scientists on the
ECS Project can assess the existing data and metadata to
determine suitability for use in the project, and identify gaps
where additional data or metadata are required.
Milestone 3. Improve access to a variety of regional and
global coastlines through development of an interactive map
service and updating of other online services to provide the
most direct and up-to-date links to various vector shoreline
data, including a new high-resolution community coastline
data set developed at NGDC.
Access to the NGDC’s coastline data sets was improved
through the migration of the Coastline Extractor Tool to new
technologies. Also, the Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical,
High-resolution Shoreline (GSHHS) data set was updated
and the new version made available at NGDC (http://www.
ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/shorelines/gshhs.html).
NGDC-08ImproveIntegrationofCoastalData
toSupportCommunityResiliency
FEDERAL LEAD: SUSAN MCLEAN
CIRES LEAD: BARRY EAKINS
NOAA Goal 3: Weather and Water
Project Goal: Improve integration of coastal data and develop