Instrumentation, platforms, and data formats for ocean currents and temperature: a brief overview

Platforms Teledyne (RD instruments

Operational Oceanography: measured and derived ocean currents

Operational Oceanography: water temperature

Challenges for coordinating data aggregation for different instruments and platforms Different data delivery formats Varying horizontal and vertical resolutions Varying time sampling intervals Varying methods of data delivery: I.e. telemetry - wireless, satellite

Data Formats Real-time formats typically a standard format such as WMO, which is utilized over the GTS system. Although it may be a proprietary manufacturer’s data format. Some systems, like on Explorer of the Seas, has enough bandwidth to download large portions of the data every 15 minutes using rsync. Near real-time formats data formats that may include QA/QC. These formats vary from tables produced on web pages and traditional flat ASCII files, to self-describing binary formats such as NetCDF. Archive formats typically self-describing data formats in ASCII,GIS or NetCDF. Web services tools now provide methods to have the user display and download the data in the several different formats.

Data delivery methods to users Site specific website pages query and download Community portal web GIS at CSV(Comma Separated Value) files (flat ASCII format) netCDF files DODS/OPeNDAP query interface ESRI ShapefilesWFS (Web Feature Service) Web Service query with XML or SOAP response Google Earth Examples of all the above may be found at:

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