CCHDO: delivering high quality hydrographic data from the Southern Ocean and beyond

The mission of the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO) is to perform meticulous curation and dissemination of the highest quality CTD, hydrographic, carbon and tracer water column data. These data are a product of decades of observations from multiple programs, past and present, around the world. The datasets and their associated documentation are readily available for immediate research and education uses, and are easily accessible through an intuitive and well known online search and download site (cchdo.io).

While CCHDO data are global, it has several initiatives specific to the Southern Ocean (SO). First, CCHDO contributes to the Southern Ocean Observing System (SOOS), and has contributed to the development of SOOSmap, a geospatial data portal allowing users to access and analyze data from multiple platforms and programs in the SO. Built on the data aggregation and sharing infrastructure of the European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet), SOOSmap users can discover, plot, explore, and download datasets of relevance to biologists, ecologists, ice scientists, and physical oceanographers.

Second, CCHDO is a contributor, and leader, within the EarthCube/SeaView NSF-funded project. SeaView is a consortium of ocean data centers working together to make oceanographic data more accessible and interoperable. Seaview produces thematic collections of integrated data in standard formats, and aligns the formats and metadata in ways that often need deep knowledge of the domain and of the specific data sets. SeaView has produced an integrated collection around the SO that includes CCHDO CTD & Bottle data, LTER Palmer Station Zooplankton Density, a subset of the ICoMM MicrOBIS microbial dataset and spatio-temporally correlated ARGO float data.

This collection is available from seaviewdata.org in either ODV format, or as netCDF files compatible with a variety of popular analysis packages and computer languages.

Finally, SOOS and SeaView are collaborating on a series of ocean data hackathons that gather ocean scientists to work with expert data managers to explore and analyze these collated datasets with a view to generating new publications and resolving old scientific questions. The first hack was held at Polar 2018.