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As part of the association of the NODC SW Liaison Office with the Joint Environmental Data Analysis Center (JEDA Center), a collaboration between NODC and Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO), Dr. Hall has developed GOODBase (Global Ocean Observation Data Base), a relational and object-oriented database system which holds the physical and chemical ocean profiles available to NODC as of the first quarter of 1992. This includes 4.6 million temperature profiles, 1.3 million salinity profiles, and lesser numbers of oxygen, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate profiles.
Data is delivered to users through a World Wide Web browser (Mosaic or Netscape), either as an HTML formatted page, or as a hyperlink to a file available through anonymous FTP. Selection criteria include latitude and longitude range, date range, and instrument type (MBT, XBT, CTD, or Station Bottle data). In addition, several filters are available to narrow the selection by season, country of origin, and status of quality flags. Output is available in several formats, including flat ASCII tables (with or without column labels), SD2 (which has for many years been NODC's standard data format for station data), and GTSP format (a relatively new format used for quality control and analysis of temperature and salinity data). Rather than a page or file of data, the user may also elect to see a graphic distribution map of the selected stations.
Hardware and software for the current version of GOODBase include a Sun SPARC Superstation II with SunOS 5.4, 18 GB of disk space on two spindles, the Illustra Database System, release 3.2, the Netscape Communications Server, IDL for graphics rendering, and PERL to tie it all together (read the Web form output, build SQL commands and submit them to the Illustra database, reformat data output, spawn IDL to build graphics files, and finally return the product to the NEtscape server for shipment to the user). Future plans include addition of more chemical data types, additional metadata, and a more powerful spatial search algorithm.
Access to the system hompage is open to everyone with a Web browser, at URL: http://cyberia.ucsd.edu/~miadmin/goodbase.html.
However, data requests will be serviced only for authorized users. Currently, all persons at SIO and NOAA are authorized, and any other government or academic researchers can be added to the authorization list by contacting the administrator (miadmin@cyberia.ucsd.edu).
Diggs, S., N. Hall, and W. White. 1996. Joint Environmental Data Analysis Center Contributions to WOCE. International WOCE Newsetter, 22: 15-17.
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