Evolving NOAA SCAT Data Management Standard

Abstract

ABSTRACT To address the growing detail, complexity, and volume of data collected and developed during oil spill response, and facilitate data sharing and conversion between data collection and storage and management systems across diverse parties to a response, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Office of Response and Restoration (ORR) has developed and published a data management standard for observational Shoreline Cleanup Assessment Technique (SCAT). The standard was cooperatively developed by NOAA and others in the response community over the past three years through a series of workshops and meetings. The standard is agnostic about physical spill environment, data collection methods, algorithms, software and computing environment, and requires only the most basic structured data to preserve the maximum flexibility for spill specific conditions and the unanticipated needs of future data collection. NOAA is also in the process of expanding the role of the DIVER (Data Integration Visualization Exploration and Reporting) centralized data warehouse and query tools used to house, query and visualize analytical results, field observations, photos and other information. As part of this effort, DIVER is being expanded to ingest and store SCAT data compliant with the standard using a SCAT data management standard. We anticipate that the use of the standard will be mandated as part of data sharing agreements put in place for future incidents for spills involving NOAA or other federal agencies. As such, we seek to widely disseminate information about the standard to the spill response community. Here, we discuss the components of the standard in detail, and provide information on available documentation, example data, file interchange formats, and methods to provide feedback to NOAA.