World Ocean Database as a dissemination tool for distributed quality controlled ocean profile data

The World Ocean Database (WOD) is the largest publicly available uniform format quality controlled database for ocean profile data (temperature, salinity, oxygen, nutrients, carbon variables, biological variables). The WOD is a basis for many oceanographic and climate studies. Climate studies in particular are dependent on high quality data to separate climate change signal from noise. With over 14 million ocean profiles from ship based and autonomous instruments and growing, the task of identifying high quality measurements and applying automatic and manual quality control within WOD is large and ongoing. The International Quality Controlled Oceanographic Database (IQuOD) project aims to make publicly available an internationally agreed upon set of temperature (and eventually salinity) profile data with quality control suitable for climate studies. The IQuOD project will subject data within the WOD (and newly acquired historical data) to rigorous expert quality control following agreed upon standards. The IQuOD dataset will be available through the WOD distribution system with its own set of IQuOD quality flags. Original values, bias corrections, and instrument based uncertainties will be included. This will allow a researcher to request and download a standardized quality dataset for climate research. This will relieve the researcher of the need to perform basic quality control and will allow for comparison of results whereby data and quality control will be a constant rather than a variable. How and in what form IQuOD will be disseminated through WOD and the relation of IQuOD to the overall WOD will be discussed.