IOOS.US: Connecting Regional Ocean Data to the U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System

The U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System (IOOS) coordinates the contributions of federal and nonfederal ocean observing and modeling systems across the nation, and also serves as the system architect for data management and communications. The IOOS Regional Associations (RA) are foundational to the system, enabling integration of local and regional ocean data into the national IOOS infrastructure. IOOS leverages the RA data services to automatically integrate nonfederal datasets into a collection of national products and tools that are hosted at ioos.us.

The ioos.us portal is designed to provide central access to pan-regional ocean data across the IOOS enterprise of federal and nonfederal partners, and to promote regional partners as reliable sources of timely and accurate ocean data. For example, the IOOS Data Catalog (data.ioos.us) serves as the master inventory of IOOS datasets and data access services provided by the RAs and federal partners. To date, users can find and access over 12,000 datasets through this product. Another product, the IOOS Model Viewer (eds.ioos.us), is a map-based visualization that integrates modeled ocean variables from federal and nonfederal sources, with additional analysis tools for basic comparisons and model validation. A backend THREDDS server (tds.eds.ioos.us) provides direct access to aggregated source data with standards-compliant Web Mapping Services enabled. As a real-time data analog, the IOOS Environmental Sensor Map (sensors.ioos.us) is a map-based visualization that integrates real-time observations across the IOOS enterprise. Over 30,000 datasets are available that report over 30 million observations weekly, with added features to examine climatologies, data quality flags, and ‘data views’ that focus on environmental events or scenarios. An ERDDAP data server (erddap.sensors.ioos.us/erddap) provides users the flexibility to download the data in common file formats. Improvements to these products and services are underway to continue pushing IOOS as a resource for integrated ocean data that complements and promotes regional observing and modeling activities.