The Distributed Oceanographic Match-up Service

An overview of the Distributed Oceanographic Match-up Service (DOMS) will be presented. DOMS is being developed to find co-located satellite and in-situ observations in datasets in support of satellite calibration/validation studies, evaluation of in-situ data quality, planning for future field experiments, and a range of user-specific research projects. The service will provide a mechanism for users to input a series of geospatial references for satellite observations (e.g., footprint location, date, and time) and receive the in-situ observations that are “matched” to the satellite data within a selectable temporal and spatial domain. The inverse of inputting in-situ geospatial data (e.g., positions of moorings, floats, or ships) and returning corresponding satellite observations will also be supported. The DOMS prototype will include several characteristic in-situ and satellite observation datasets. For the in-situ data, the focus will be surface marine observations from the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS), the Shipboard Automated Meteorological and Oceanographic System Initiative (SAMOS), and the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS). Satellite products will include JPL ASCAT L2 12.5 km winds, the Aquarius v3.0 L2 orbital/swath dataset, MODIS L2 1 km swath data, and the high-resolution gridded L4 MUR-SST product. Importantly, although DOMS will be prototyped with these selected datasets, it will be readily extendable to other in-situ and satellite collections, which will support additional science disciplines.

Technical challenges to be addressed include (1) ensuring that the match-up algorithms perform with sufficient speed to return desired information to the user, (2) performing data matches using datasets that are distributed on the network, and (3) returning actual observations for the matches [e.g., salinity] with sufficient metadata so the value difference can be properly interpreted. We will leverage existing technologies (i.e., the Extensible Data Gateway Environment, webification, OPeNDAP, relational and graph/triple-store databases) and cloud computing to develop DOMS. DOMS will be equipped with a web portal interface for web users to browse and to submit match-up requests interactively. DOMS will also provide an underlying web service interface for machine-to-machine operations to enable external applications and services that are suitable for large-scale matchup queries. Progress on the DOMS technical development will be presented to stimulate discussion in the ESIP community.