Current Approaches to Improving Marine Geophysical Data Discovery and Access

Exploring, understanding, and managing the global oceans is a challenge when hydrographic maps are available for only 5% of the world’s oceans, even less of which have been mapped geologically or to identify benthic habitats. Seafloor mapping is expensive and most government and academic budgets continue to tighten. The first step for any mapping program, before setting out to map uncharted waters, should be to identify if data currently exist in the area of interest. There are many reasons why this seemingly simple suggestion is not commonplace. While certain datasets are accessible online (e.g., NOAA’s NCEI, EMODnet, IHO-DCDB), many are not. In some cases, data that are publicly available are difficult to discover and access.

No single agency can successfully resolve the complex and pressing demands of ocean and coastal mapping and the associated data stewardship. NOAA partners with other federal agencies to provide an integrated approach to carry out a coordinated and comprehensive ocean and coastal mapping program. In order to maximize the return on their mapping investment, legacy and newly acquired data must be easily discoverable and readily accessible by numerous applications and formats now and well into the future. At NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), resources are focused on ensuring the security and widespread availability of the Nation’s scientific marine geophysical data through long-term stewardship.

The public value of these data and products is maximized by streamlining data acquisition and processing operations, minimizing redundancies, facilitating discovery, and developing common standards to promote re-use. For its part, NCEI draws on a variety of software technologies and adheres to international standards to meet this challenge. The result is a geospatial framework built on spatially-enabled databases, standards-based web services, and International Standards Organization (ISO) metadata.

In order to maximize effectiveness in ocean and coastal mapping, we must be sure that limited funding is not being used to collect data in areas where data already exist. By making data more accessible, NCEI extends the use of, and therefore the value of, these data. Working together, we can ensure that valuable data are made available to the broadest community.

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