Quality Control and Processing of Historical Oceanographic Nutrient Data

By Conkright, Margarita E.

Excerpt
Acknowledgements: This work was made possible by a grant from the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program which established a research group at the National Oceanographic Data Center to focus on the preparation of research quality oceanographic data sets, objective analyses and diagnostic studies with these data sets. Substantial amounts of historical oceanographic data used in this study were located and digitized with support from several agencies. Data Archaeology and Rescue projects were supported with funding from the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program, the NOAA Environmental Science Data ance Information Management Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. The data used are the master oceanographic data archives maintained by NODC/WDC-A as well as data acquired as a result of the NODC Data Archaeology and Rescue (NODAR) project and the IODE/IOC Global Oceanographic Data Archaeology and Rescue (GODAR) project. We would like to acknowledge the scientists who have submitted their data to national and regional data centers and the data managers at the various data centers. We would like to thank Doug Hamilton and Linda Stathoplos for reviewing this manuscript.

Table of Contents
CONTENTS List of tables......................................................................................................................... iv List of figures ......................................................................................................................vii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................... ix Abstract.................................................................................................................................1 Introduction...........................................................................................................................1 Data sources and distributions ...............................................................................................2 Quality control .......................................................................................................................3 A. Preliminary quality control .......................................................................................4 B. Range check on the observed level data ....................................................................4 (a) Phosphate .......................................................................................................5 (b) Nitrate ............................................................................................................6 (c) Silicate............................................................................................................6 C. Interpolation from observed to standard depth levels.................................................7 D. Statistical analysis of data at standard depth levels....................................................8 E. Objective analysis .....................................................................................................8 Summary and future work ......................................................................................................9 References...........................................................................................................................11 Appendix 1. Data flags and data availability .........................................................................14 A. Depth error flags..............................................................................................................14 B. Profile error flags .............................................................................................................14 Appendix 2. Fortran program to read and write observed level and standard level vertical profile data ..............................................................................................................16 Appendix 3. Sample output of observed level nutrient data...................................................21 Appendix 4. One-degree square horizontal co-ordinate system of the analyzed fields ..........22 Appendix 5. Five-degree square horizontal co-ordinate system of the analyzed fields...........23 Appendix 6. WMO square chart ...........................................................................................24 iii