Designing a quality oceanographic data processing environment

Oceanographic data are increasing by data types and volume making present methods of processing and determining quality a cumbersome task. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration´s (NOAA) Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services (CO-OPS) is developing an end-to-end, state-of-the-art data management system to ingest, quality control, analyze, and disseminate water velocity and related data. The benefits include streamlining preliminary analysis, thus allowing time and resources for more in-depth investigations of the physical phenomena, increasing consistency of results between users, and improving overall data quality. The design of the system architecture follows a planned structured methodology improving the quality of the software developed. Designing a Web-based modular system will allow flexibility so the system can accommodate new analyses, reports and plots as well as allow for future data types. Well-defined algorithms will be implemented determining the quality of both the data and the analyses. This data management system will provide oceanographers the means to study water velocity data using a wide suite of mathematical and graphical tools. This will allow users to focus on the analysis results rather than the process.