Supplementary material to “International Ocean Research: Common Opportunities and Challenges”

Ed Urban, Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland

Citation:
Urban, E. (2007), International ocean research: Common opportunities and challenges, Eos Trans. AGU, 88(25), 265. [Full Article (pdf)]

The Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR) convened a Summit of International Marine Research Projects on 7–9 December 2006 in London (UK), hosted by the Royal Society. The purpose of this meeting was to bring together representatives of the major international projects and programs involved in ocean research and observation to discuss common opportunities, issues, and problems. The agenda included data management and the role of World Data Centers in data management; data visualization; interactions of international research projects with the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS); needs for time-series stations; activities related to the International Polar Year; and capacity building in developing nations. Meeting participants included representatives from virtually all international marine research projects and programmes, the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) panels, and two other organizations of the International Council for Science (ICSU) besides SCOR: the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR). Two World Data Centers (WDCs) were also represented: the World Data Center on Oceanography (Silver Spring), and the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences. Information about the meeting is available on the meeting Web page ( http://www.scor-int.org/Project_Summit_2/ProjCoord2.htm).

Two major concerns arose from the meeting:

  1. the impending interruption of important satellite observations; and
  2. data management and communications, particularly the need for new incentives to encourage ocean scientists to submit their data in a timely manner to national and international data centers.

Meeting participants expressed serious concerns about plans to reduce the coverage of satellite observations of the ocean and interrupt the stream of ocean data from satellites. The advent of satellite observations of the ocean in the 1970s revolutionized our ability to study and understand large-scale phenomena and processes that affect the global climate and the productivity of the ocean. Progress in our understanding of how ocean physics and chemistry interact with living organisms and ecosystems in space and time will be impaired by the loss of high-quality satellite data streams. Prompt action is needed to prevent this from happening.

Satellite observation programs that are particularly imperiled and must be maintained include sea surface height, ocean color, and sea surface vector winds and waves. Likewise, the long-term continuity of measurements of sea ice, microwave sea surface temperature, and rainfall measurements must be assured. Sea surface height is important for measuring changes in sea level, ocean currents, and basin-scale climate oscillations—such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation—that are affected by and influence climate. Ocean color helps us understand and predict ocean productivity and changes in the oceanic cycles of important chemical elements. Sea surface vector wind and wave measurements are important for understanding how heat and climatically important gases are transferred between the ocean and the atmosphere. In addition to the use of satellite data for research, data from ocean-viewing satellites are essential to establishing global ocean observing systems for assessing and forecasting climate and the health of ocean ecosystems. Reducing the data streams from satellites will imperil these observing systems.

Meeting participants noted with concern that it is still difficult to get scientists to submit their data to national and international databases. There are many different reasons why data are not submitted in a timely manner, including lack of incentives. Meeting participants concluded that the problem could be reduced by developing new incentives for submitting data to data centers. The practice of some funding agencies to require that research proposals include plans for submission of data to databases could be extended to other agencies and enforced more consistently. Some of the journals in which ocean scientists publish their research results (e.g., Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems and the Journal of Marine Micropaleontology) require or encourage submission of the data on which the paper is based to a recognized database. As is already done in the field of molecular biology, this approach could be adopted more widely by ocean science journals. Data reposing in data centers must also be accessible, and methods for access need to be improved. One approach is to assign persistent identifiers to data sets. These identifiers make data citable, correctable, and tied to research publications. Meeting participants recommended that SCOR create a panel with a mandate to make recommendations about bibliographic citation of data. Prime facilities for long-term archiving and publication of data are the National Oceanographic Data Centers (NODCs) and the ICSU WDCs. Meeting participants noted recommendations from past research projects that 5-10% (e.g., see Glover et al., 2006) of project budgets should be set aside for project data management and that these funds should be protected against cuts caused by scaling back of research funding. Operational monitoring programmes may require higher percentages (10–20%) of their budgets for data management.

Many of the projects represented at the meeting are planning research activities in the polar oceans during the International Polar Year (IPY). Hence, the meeting provided an opportunity for information transfer about these activities among the projects. SCOR and SCAR are encouraging the scientists involved in IPY ocean projects to contribute their data to international databases as a legacy of IPY. Particularly important is the availability of information about the bathymetry of the Southern Ocean, which is relevant to many other aspects of ocean research, observations, and modeling. Meeting participants felt that scientists working in the Southern Ocean should make special efforts to collect and submit Southern Ocean bathymetry data to their national data centers and to the World Data Center for Marine Geology and Geophysics. The goal is to produce a seamless database of all Southern Ocean bathymetric data gridded together, in order that the scientists who need the data will not have to search for them among individual scientists, institutions, and national data centers. Scientific Steering Committees of international projects should urge participating scientists to collect and process multi-beam bathymetric data throughout all stages of their research cruises, independent of the priorities of their scientific mission. Within the objectives of the project, scientists should plan their cruise tracks, including transits to and from Antarctic bases, in such a way as to fill gaps in existing bathymetric coverage, thus contributing to the building of the bathymetric database for the Southern Ocean and to the development of the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO).

All of the projects and organizations represented at the meeting are involved in training, education, and capacity building, so there was a lively discussion of what is being done now and what more should be done to help train scientists in developing countries. For a start, a meeting participant offered to create a Web-based catalog of ocean science capacity-building activities presently conducted by different projects and organizations. That catalog is underway. Meeting participants recommended that research projects interact with the new SCOR Committee on Capacity Building and that this committee work with other organizations that are involved in ocean science capacity building, such as the Partnership for Observations of the Global Oceans (POGO) and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), as well as other international and regional organizations that carry out capacity building more broadly.

The meeting organizers and participants thank the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for providing funding for this second meeting of international ocean research projects convened by SCOR. The consensus was that this kind of meeting should take place on a regular basis to help projects deal with issues of mutual concern.

Meeting participants included Dawn Ashby, Beatriz Balino, Manuel Barange, Sophie Beauvais, Emily Breviere, Murray Brown, Peter Burkill, Susan Carbotte, Howard Cattle, Mark Costello, Michael Diepenbroek, Robert Gelfeld, Chris German, Fred Grassle, Hannes Grobe, Julie Hall, Pat Halpin, Jeff Hare, Ed Harrison, Gideon Henderson, Karen Heywood, Peter Liss, Tom Malone, Jerry Miller, David Monahan, Ron O’Dor, Raymond Pollard, Robin Raine, Sylvie Roy, Uwe Send, Mike Sparrow, Colin Summerhayes, Bjørn Sundby, Rowan Sutton, Ed Urban, and Cisco Werner.

References

Glover, D.M., C.L. Chandler, S.C. Doney, K.O. Buesseler, G. Heimerdinger, J.K.B. Bishop, and G.R. Flierl. 2006. The US JGOFS data management experience. Deep-Sea Research II 53:793–802.