The new dataset collection is from the network of automated Marine Weather and Oceanographic Stations deployed by AIMS since the 1980’s.
A new dataset collection from the Northern Australia Automated Marine Weather and Oceanographic Stations is available on the Australian Ocean Data Network (AODN) Portal thanks to the collaboration between the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) and IMOS.
Recently, AIMS was funded by the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) to improve access to live and historic data. The project aimed to establish an automated process to synchronise data between existing AIMS and AODN infrastructure as well as enable programmatic access via an Application Programming Interface (API) allowing analysis in R and Python environments.
AIMS and AODN staff worked together to establish the automated harvest from the existing AIMS internal operational systems through to the AODN infrastructure making the dataset collection findable, visualisable, filterable and downloadable via the AODN Portal.
Automatic weather sites either on reefs themselves, on poles in reef lagoons or on tourist pontoons or other structures have been deployed by AIMS since the early 1980’s. The weather stations are equipped with sensors to measure some or all of the following parameters: sea temperature at a range of depths, atmospheric pressure, air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation (light as PAR), wind direction and wind speed. These data are collected to support scientific research at AIMS.
The data collection is comprised of 18 active stations; 11 in Queensland, one in the Northern territory, one in Western Australia and five in the Torres Strait. The other 11 stations are from historical datasets collected since the 1980’s. In the AODN Portal the historical sites are differentiated by the word historical after the “Location Name” on step 2.
The dataset collection in the AODN Portal can be filtered using subsets such as time, location name, instrument type and many more, and served up as CSV files.
A number of funding bodies have contributed to the infrastructure and data collection, or continue to contribute to and support the program. In addition to the Northern Australia Automated Marine Weather and Oceanographic Stations Program, these include: IMOS (through the Wireless Sensor Networks Facility), the Queensland State Government, the Tropical Water Quality Hub of the National Environmental Science Programme (NESP) and preceding body Tropical Ecosystems Hub of the National Environmental Research Program (NERP).
For any feedback or assistance in data retrieval please contact info(at)aodn.org.au