A NA-ARC webapp ecosystem overview

The primary goal of the NA-ARC webapp ecosystem is to simplify the Argo user access to a specific subset of the Argo dataset and information about it.

The global Argo array is made of about 3,000 free-drifting floats measuring temperature and salinity (along with possibly other parameters such as oxygen) of the upper ocean. This continuous ocean monitoring in space and time produces a tremendous amount of data, made publicly available within hours. Argo data are available for download on ftp servers hosted by the two GDACs (Global Data Assembly Centers: USGODAE and Coriolis). As of February 2012, more than 900,000 NetCDF profile files were available on these servers. From the user perspective, especially new ones, engaging with such an amount of data may be impressive, and a laborious task.

As a complementary to other online services, we designed a new information and data mining tool for Argo data in the North Atlantic to help users to engage with the data. This is a contribution to the North Atlantic Argo Regional Center (NA-ARC) and therefore only concerns Argo profiles located in North Atlantic Ocean North of 20S, in the Mediterranean and Arctic Seas.

This NA-ARC webapp ecosystem aims to:

• Provide an interactive user interface for Argo data mining,
• Simplify access to information about all, or a sub-set of, profiles,
• Centralize as much as possible information provided by other services.

To this end, the NA-ARC webapp ecosystem is made of:

• A database, updated every day, which contains as much as possible information necessary to explore and select Argo profiles,
• A web API (or web service) providing a standard and programmatical access to the database information but also useful mash-up of them,
• A website providing an user interface to the database through the web API.

This documentation is all about the database and web API description.