D: MANAGEMENT OF DATA AND INFORMATION

Archiving 1 Million Observations per Month and Growing!

The Integrated Science Data Management (ISDM) branch of DFO Science is the data manager for the Atlantic Zone Monitoring Program, the Aquatic Invasive Species Program, the Aquatic Animal Health Program, the Pacific Ocean Shelf Tracking Program, and Argo, as well as the many different kinds of oceanographic data collected by DFO Science. The volume of ocean data continues to grow — for certain types of data, ISDM archives are expanding by about 1 million observations a month, a factor of 3 increase in the last five years.

The measurement coverage and sampling rate of the world's oceans has been increasing in recent years, and temperature and salinity observations are more and more available in real-time using satellite technology. Since its inception, ISDM (previously MEDS) has been responsible for controlling ocean data quality in real-time and disseminating and archiving the data collected by Canadian and international programs. This year, ISDM, in relation with a recently established Centre of Expertise — the virtual Centre for Ocean Model Development and Application — has taken things a step further by enabling integration of all available temperature and salinity data in the production of real-time, three-dimensional ocean fields.