The National Mooring Network is a complex facility in the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) program, with different oceanographic instruments deployed in many sites all around Australia, with observations going back 70 years at some stations. However, visualising and analysing the entire time series for a single parameter from one site requires some technical expertise, and this requirement is limiting the use and the impact of the observations in the broader user community. In April this year, the IMOS Working Group on Moorings Time Series Products started a dedicated project to create a range products in a more accessible format.
This particular product will aggregate one single variable recorded by all available instruments at one site. The resulting aggregation will reduce the number of files a user needs to access in order to view and analyse the complete time series of a parameter at an IMOS mooring site, and provides time series data to the moorings community in a well-documented format. Expert users who wish to look at the data at its observed sampling frequency, without any interpolation through the water column, are the intended audience and encouraged to use this product. The aggregated time series are available at AODN THREDDS server in a dedicated folder (“aggregated_timeseries”) inside each site directory. See for example;
http://thredds.aodn.org.au/thredds/catalog/IMOS/ANMN/NRS/NRSMAI/aggregated_timeseries/catalog.html.
The variables included are temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll estimates, turbidity and downwelling photosynthetic photon flux (PAR), always accompanied with depth and pressure when available, and their respective quality control flags. More than 2.8 billion records from almost 11,000 instrument deployments were aggregated in 222 files. An average file contains 5.6 million observations from 23 deployments over 5.5 years. The aggregation includes deployments since September 2007 to the present, and the product will be updated regularly to include the latest deployments.
Detailed documentation of the product and the Python code used to produce the files are available at https://github.com/aodn/python-aodntools/tree/master/aodntools/timeseries_products, and a discussion forum open for comments and improvement suggestions.
We expect to deliver in the coming months, similar products for velocity parameters and biogeochemical profiles.
For any questions about the product or the project please contact info(at)aodn.org.au