Oceans observation data is now replicated and stored on a daily basis with B2SAFE

There is an increasing concern about global change and its regional impact. For example, sea level is rising at an accelerating rate of 3 mm/year, Arctic sea ice cover is shrinking and high latitude areas are warming rapidly. These effects are caused by a mix of long-term climate change and natural variability. Lack of sustained observations of the atmosphere, oceans and land has hindered the development and validation of climate models.

The international Argo programme was initiated in 1999 as a pilot project endorsed by the Climate Research Program of the World Meteorological Organization, the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS), and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) to set up the first-ever global in-site ocean observing network in the history of oceanography thanks to a global array of more than 3500 instruments reporting subsurface ocean properties to a wide range of users via satellite transmission links to data centres. 

This increasing volume of data being produced, curated, and made available by Argo requires services that are able to optimize the delivery and staging of data for researchers and other users of scientific data. Specialized data services for managing data life cycle, for creating and delivering data products, and for customized data processing and analysis all play a crucial role in how Argo serves its communities, and many of these activities are time-critical needing to be carried out frequently within specific time windows. 

The EOSC-hub project is helping the Euro-Argo community, the European chapter of the Argo framework, in managing this huge amount of real-time data via the EOSC-hub Marine Research Competence Center.

EOSC-hub is supporting Euro-Argo in developing a Data Analytics Platform to support data storage and processing. Data are staged in/out the EUDAT infrastructure using the B2STAGE service, the EUDAT service meant to transfer research data sets between data resources and computing workspaces, and processed through the use of EGI Cloud resources in the form of containers.

A web application to enable users to configure data subsetting or automated subscription to visualize and stage the data from B2SAFE (the EUDAT data replication and long term preservation service) to and from the data analytics platform has been recently developed, allowing a daily synchronisation.

This is a great achievement for the Euro-Argo community as all new data sets received from regional centers are pipelined through using configurable processes ranging from processing to long term preservation. Thanks to this new Data Analytics platform, researchers can concentrate their efforts on analysing data rather than taking care of their underneath management.

The Euro-Argo / EOSC-hub collaboration is part of the activities of the Marine Competence Center.