In Situ TAC Dashboard, an Advanced Tool for visualizing CMEMS In Situ products

Abstract

<p>The In Situ Thematic Assembly Center (In Situ TAC) for the Copernicus Marine Environment Monitoring Service (CMEMS) is the only data component in the system, out of a total of fifteen, in charge of delivering quality-checked in situ observations in both near real time (NRT products) and delay mode (REP products) for their use in the characterisation of ocean state and variability, assimilation and/or validation activities carried out by the metocean community. </p><p>These in situ observations are gathered by a wide range of platforms (tide gauges, buoys, vessels, CTDs, profilers, gliders, drifters, HF radars, saildrones etc) and include many different parameters (Temperature, Salinity, Sea Level, Currents, Waves, Oxygen, Chlorophyll, Nutrients, Carbon etc). They are made available through known networks and regional data providers to a set of Production Units (PUs) or dedicated Data Centers (Ifremer, PdE, HCMR, IMR, IO-BAS, BSH, SMHI, UiB, CNR, AZTI) where they are quality-checked and homogenized before delivery in terms of format, quality control conventions and standards.</p><p>Unlike most of the products available in the CMEMS catalog (90%), in situ  data products do not naturally provide a regular temporal and spatial coverage or resolution. Indeed, these in situ observations can be available at fixed locations, or on a trajectory, or in a gridded area, at fixed depths or on profiles and the transmitting equipment can be configured to report data in different time samplings. Such a  complexity has traditionally prevented 82% of the In Situ TAC products from fully taking advantage of  CMEMS centralized improvements  in terms of the visualization of datasets (WMS) and subsetting (Subsetter). </p><p>To overcome  this situation, a first version of the CMEMS In Situ TAC Dashboard was released in 2017. This tool provides a user-friendly interface which enables the discovery, subsetting, sharing and downloading of files containing in-situ observations from In Situ TAC multiparameter NRT products. The tool relies on a set of python scripts which process homogenized metadata on an hourly basis as well as complementary information submitted by Sea Data Net (provider overview). The resulting information is then accessible through  the interface with the aid of a json-server REST API, which allows users to make queries and filter the information according to their interest.</p><p>In 2020, the current release of the CMEMS In Situ Dashboard has been officially approved as an “Advanced Visualization Tool” by CMEMS and is now showcased as a complementary tool to the official viewer. Future developments will explore its extension to the whole In Situ product family (beyond the present In Situ multiparameter NRT datasets), the improvement of data visualization options (currently using EMODnet widget services) and the implementation of data discovery capabilities.</p>