The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System: A Decade of Data Aggregation and Services.

The Gulf of Mexico Coastal Ocean Observing System Regional Association (GCOOS-RA) celebrated its 10-year anniversary in 2015. GCOOS-RA is one of 11 RAs organized under the NOAA-led U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) Program Office to aggregate regional data and make these data publicly-available in preferred forms and formats via standards-based web services. Initial development of GCOOS focused on building elements of the IOOS Data Management and Communications Plan which is a framework for end-to-end interoperability. These elements included: data discovery, catalog, metadata, online-browse, data access and transport. Initial data types aggregated included near real-time physical oceanographic, marine meteorological and satellite data. Our focus in the middle of the past decade was on the production of basic products such as maps of current oceanographic conditions and quasi-static datasets such as bathymetry and climatologies. In the latter part of the decade we incorporated historical physical oceanographic datasets and historical coastal and offshore water quality data into our holdings and added our first biological dataset. We also developed web environments and products to support Citizen Scientists and stakeholder groups such as recreational boaters. Current efforts are directed towards applying data quality assurance (testing and flagging) to non-federal data, data archiving at national repositories, serving and visualizing numerical model output, providing data services for glider operators, and supporting marine biodiversity observing networks. GCOOS Data Management works closely with the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative Information and Data Cooperative and various groups involved with Gulf Restoration. GCOOS-RA has influenced attitudes and behaviors associated with good data stewardship and data management practices across the Gulf and will to continue to do so into the next decade.