Presenter: Nico Lange (GEOMAR)

Description:
The Global Ocean Observing System implementation plan is calling for more systematic and sustainable approaches for observations across ocean data platforms and networks. This represents an important opportunity and challenge for the ship-based time-series community to collaborate around a common set of objectives and a unifying framework for data collection, analysis, and reporting. In particular, data synthesis and modeling efforts across ocean time series represent important and necessary steps forward in broadening our view of a changing ocean, and maximizing the return on our continued investment in these programs. Here, we present the development of a consistent ship-based biogeochemical (BGC) pilot synthesis product. The pilot’s mission is to bring the ocean BGC time-series community together to jointly develop a consistent data product and agree on Best-Practices, striving for Observations Coordination Group (OCG) network status and delivering timely and high impact BGC time-series data. It utilizes the high-quality BGC data from eleven time series sites from five ocean basins to support the timely delivery of scientific information on ocean BGC trends and variability across main bioeco-domains of the world ocean. It will be used for improving and testing BGC ocean models, supporting autonomous observation networks and facilitating regular global assessments. An integral part of the pilot is the development of community-agreed ship-based time-series BGC 1) data flow standards, 2) metadata- and 3) data policy guidelines, as well as 4) quality control protocols and tools. Eventually these developments and the pilot synthesis product itself will pave the way for the overarching goal of a fully FAIR data time series model for marine biogeochemical but also ecological time-series.