The IMOS Ship of Opportunity Expendable Bathythermograph (SOOP XBT) facility and the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN), collaborated to streamline the Near Real Time (NRT) data ingestion process for high resolution ocean temperature data.
In August, 2020, the SOOP XBT program began delivery of NRT temperature data in high-resolution (data every 0.6m up to 800m depth), where previously only 30 data points were available. After these changes, the NRT collection ingestion process from CSIRO to AODN underwent major alterations, with Bec Cowley of CSIRO and the AODN team working together to successfully streamline the process.
The SOOP XBT NRT data is delivered to the Global Telecommunication System (GTS) in the Binary Universal Form (BUFR) format within hours of data collection, allowing weather agencies to ingest the data into their weather and climate models. Copies of these files are also delivered to the AODN, and work completed by CSIRO and AODN resulted in an automated conversion script that creates AODN compliant NetCDF files, as well as creating consistency between both delayed mode data and NRT XBT observations.
Updating the delivery process enables researchers to access ocean temperature data almost immediately after the data has been collected. Scientifically quality controlled versions of the data (the delayed mode data) are made available via the AODN some weeks after observations are performed.
The IMOS – SOOP Expendable Bathythermographs (XBT) Research Group – XBT real-time data collection is freely available on the AODN Portal, where it can be sub-setted and downloaded as CSV, Python, Un-subsetted NetCDF’s and a List of URL’s.
This news item was written in collaboration with Bec Cowley and AODN
For any questions or feedback about this dataset or any other AODN Portal collections, please contact us at [email protected]